Expert opinion on the attack in Hanau: Deadly seconds

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Arena Bar in Hanau (archive picture): One of the crime scenes of the racist attack in the Hessian city

Photo: ARMANDO BABANI / EPA-EFE / REX

On February 19, 2020, right-wing extremist Tobias Rathjen killed nine young people with foreign roots in Hanau: on the street, in a car, in a kiosk and in three bars.

Relatives of the victims and survivors blame the authorities for the events - among other things, a possibly locked emergency exit at the sixth crime scene, the Arena Bar on Kurt-Schumacher-Platz in Kesselstadt.

Rathjen shot two young men in the bar: Said Nesar Hashemi and Hamza Kurtovic.

They and other guests had fled to the back of the bar, where they were trapped.

Two survivors from the bar and the Kurtovic family filed a complaint against unknown persons: a direct escape route was missing due to a renovation behind the counter, and the emergency exit was locked from the inside on the night of the crime.

This should not have been an exception, police officers would have known and even ordered the locking of the emergency exit in order to prevent a possible escape of visitors in the event of a raid.

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The Hanau public prosecutor found no evidence of this and closed the investigation in August.

It was not possible to clarify with certainty whether the emergency exit was really locked, according to the investigators.

Employees had stated that the door was unlocked.

In addition, it is not certain that the men could actually have escaped through an unlocked emergency exit.

Rathjen had killed his mother and then himself after the Hanau murders.

The federal prosecutor's office recently closed its investigation into the attack.

The investigators assume that Rathjen acted alone and no one knew about the act or his plan in advance.

Thus, there is unlikely to be a trial in the case.

"This locked door cost my son his life"

The hopes of the bereaved therefore now rest on the investigative committee in the Hessian state parliament.

There, on Monday, father Armin Kurtovic criticized the termination of the emergency exit procedure in the Arena Bar. "This locked door cost my son his life," said the 48-year-old.

The brother of the murdered Said Nesar Hashemi also testified as a witness before the investigative committee.

Said Etris Hashemi was in the bar himself on the night of the crime and was seriously injured.

"The emergency exit was not an option for us because everyone knew it was closed," he said according to "Faz.net".

An expert opinion that the research collective Forensic Architecture prepared on behalf of the "February 19th Initiative" could now bring movement into the question of the emergency exit.

It investigates whether the people in the Arena Bar would have had enough time to flee from the perpetrator if they had run to the emergency exit and it had been unlocked.

The investigation, the results of which are available to SPIEGEL, comes to the conclusion: “All five people had enough time to escape through the emergency exit.

If the emergency exit was open and they had known, then they could all have survived the attack. "

Shots in the neighboring kiosk

Forensic Architecture evaluated the recordings from the surveillance cameras and thus reconstructed what was happening in the bar. Accordingly, there were nine seconds between the moment when Said Etris Hashemi saw the perpetrator with a gun in hand and when Rathjen entered the bar. In the meantime, the racist killed three people in a kiosk in the same building: Gökhan Gültekin, Mercedes Kierpacz and Ferhat Unvar.

At the moment the shots were fired, the men in the Arena Bar were moving faster, according to the report. The researchers analyzed the routes taken by the five people and determined their respective speeds. They transferred these to "hypothetical paths" in the direction of the emergency exit and extended them at the respective top speed - after all, if the door had been unlocked, the people fleeing would not have run into a dead end. According to the calculations, four of the five people would have been "completely out of his field of vision" the moment Rathjen entered the bar. The fifth person would have been eight meters away and would have been "only partially and for fractions of a second in his field of vision." It is considered "extremely unlikelythat it would have been possible for the perpetrator in the time available to him in our scenario to aim and shoot at the fifth person and hit them in the process, «says Forensic Architecture.

This conclusion contradicts the findings of the public prosecutor's office, which also reconstructed the event on the basis of the video recordings. The investigators measure the time window for an escape to only five to six seconds - the period in which Rathjen entered the adjoining kiosk and, after being shot dead, left again "at a rapid pace". "Before that, the entrance area of ​​the Arena Bar and the path from the taproom to the emergency exit could be seen by the perpetrator and then blocked by the perpetrator," said the prosecutor's report. "Firing a shot at people fleeing would have been possible and expected by the perpetrator."

Prosecutors also argued that the group may have moved away from the perpetrator towards the storage room because of a "natural instinct to flee". "If the guests of the bar had fled towards the emergency exit as soon as the danger was recognized, they would probably have run into the perpetrator's arms or should have feared being attacked from behind in the hallway in front of the emergency exit," said Chief Prosecutor Dominik Mies in August . "Therefore, it seems quite possible that the victims of the crime, following their natural instinct to flee, moved away from the source of danger from the start, as they saw no chance of escaping the danger if they walked in the direction of the perpetrator."

Said Etris Hashemi had already said in his questioning by the public prosecutor that the emergency exit was closed and that they did not run there for this reason.

In such a situation, you have to make a quick decision, his statement is reflected in the report from the investigators.

When asked whether they could all have escaped through an unlocked emergency exit in time, the witness stated that he could not answer this 100 percent, the prosecution said: »Probably 'one or two would have come out', it might have been less Giving injuries «.

The view of the crucial seconds could change as a result of the new report.

Said Etris Hashemi was convinced, according to the "Frankfurter Rundschau": "If the emergency exit had been open, the five of us would have survived."

According to the report, the SPD now wants to apply for the authors of the report to be heard as witnesses in the investigative committee.

bbr / dpa