A 43-year-old German man shot and killed nine people in and around two shisha bars in the southwestern city of Hanau overnight in attacks that appear to have been motivated by far-right beliefs, officials said Thursday.
German federal prosecutors suspect terrorism in the shooting in Hanau, located in the Frankfurt metropolitan area in Hesse state.
Initial analysis of a website, believed to belong to the suspect, “indicate a xenophobic motive,” said Peter Beuth, interior minister for Hesse.
The shooting rampage in Hanau started late Wednesday at around 10pm local time, according to FRANCE 24’s Nick Spicer, reporting from Berlin.
“A gunman went to the Midnight shisha bar, opened fire and killed three people who were standing outside. He then drove about two kilometres to a second shisha bar, the Arena shisha bar, rang the doorbell, the door was opened and he shot five people, including one woman, dead. Three other people were injured,” said Spicer.
Witnesses and surveillance videos of the suspect's getaway car led authorities quickly to his home, near the scene of the second attack, where he was found dead near his 72-year-old mother, said Beuth.
Shisha bars are places where people gather to smoke flavoured tobacco from Middle Eastern water pipes.
The clientele in both shisha bars were predominantly Kurdish, according to German media.
Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said the consulate in Frankfurt and the embassy in Berlin were trying to obtain information on the attack.
“According to the initial information, it was an attack with a racist motive, but we would need to wait for the (official) statement,” he told state television TRT.
’Terrible crime’
Officers sealed off and searched the apartment in Hanau's Kesselstadt district, near the scene of one of the shootings, after following up witness statements on a getaway car.
“Thoughts this morning are with the people of Hanau, in whose midst this terrible crime was committed,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman said on Twitter.
“Deep sympathy for the affected families, who are grieving for their dead,” the spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said. “We hope with those wounded that they will soon recover.”
Merkel called off a planned visit Thursday to a university in Halle. Seibert, said she was "being constantly kept abreast of the state of the investigations in Hanau."
Halle was the site of a deadly anti-Semitic attack last year. A man expressing anti-Jewish views tried to shoot his way into a synagogue, failed and killed two passers-by before being arrested.
The shooting in Halle came months after the killing of a regional politician from Merkel's party. The suspect had a long history of neo-Nazi activity and convictions for violent crime.
"This was a terrible evening that will certainly occupy us for a long, long time and we will remember with sadness," Hanau Mayor Claus Kaminsky told the Bild newspaper. Lawmaker Katja Leikert, a member of Merkel's center-right party who represents Hanau in the German parliament, tweeted that it was “a real horror scenario for us all.”
Hanau is in Hesse state and has about 100,000 inhabitants.
(FRANCE 24 with AP and REUTERS)
