Few in the Kesselstadt neighborhood believe that the racist killing attributed to German Tobias Rathjen last Wednesday night at two cafés in the city of Hanau frequented by immigrants was an impromptu act. They point to the graffiti that the alleged murderer of ten people, nine of them of foreign origin, made in a tunnel that connects a school very close to his home - less than five minutes on foot - with the housing block where the Arena Bar & Café, the second place attacked and where five of its victims died.
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The graffiti was quickly covered with gray paint by the police, but the neighbors showed Friday on their mobile photos of the original graffiti: a web address - already deactivated - with the name of Rathjen. He had been on that wall for weeks surrounded by children's murals, the neighbors say. They also say that although Rathjen did not lavish much in that area, despite the proximity of his parents' house, where he lived lately and where he allegedly committed suicide after killing his mother, he had gone a few days ago to buy water from the same place that He ended up attacking. The recording of a security camera of the Arena Bar revealed by Focus magazine also shows on the premises, on February 15, an individual who looks like the murderer, dressed in a green pea coat and a blue hat with which he also recorded some of the racist videos he left as a legacy.
The degree of premeditation of the massacre, as well as the psychological state of Rathjen - or even, as many believe in his neighborhood, the possibility of having an accomplice - are issues that the police are still investigating. Look for any clues that help you understand the incomprehensible: what led to a 43-year-old man who had not fired the alarms of the authorities to wield a gun, take his car and go to two shisha bars (water pipes) to kill as many people as possible before returning home and taking their own lives, according to the first signs. Federal prosecutor Peter Frank said yesterday that Rathjen contacted the prosecution in November. He said he knew "a secret intelligence organization that was infiltrating people's brains to appropriate certain things and control the affairs of the world." But there were no signs of racist hatred that supposedly led him to commit the killing.
Part of those answers could be found at the Rathjen's home. The Helmholzstrasse, the quiet street where the terraced single-family house of Tobias's parents is located and where he had returned to live six months ago, continued yesterday being treated as a crime scene. To pass, the mailman who delivered the bicycle with his bicycle in the neighboring houses was forced to lift the demarcation tapes of the police, who also closely monitored that no one approached the Rathjen's house, at the end of one of several Rows of modest identical homes.
Few neighbors - some of Turkish origin, as part of the victims - speak and, of them, none have anything nice to say about a family that, despite having been installed in the neighborhood for years, was not lavish. The son “we saw him sometimes in passing, but we were never sure who he was because he barely let himself be seen. Nor did we ever see the mother, ”says Andreas Kupferer, who lives on the same street. The best known was the father, a man who "terrified the neighbors" with his constant threats over a dispute with the garbage cans. “It was a very withdrawn family, they did not maintain contact with anyone. The boy never greeted anyone, they were very closed, ”agrees Hannelore Schilling, who comes every day to take care of an old friend who lives in the same line of houses as the Rathjen. She is convinced that the father, who remains in custody but on which the authorities have not spoken again, was somehow the “instigator” of the actions attributed to his son, who left a confused manifesto in which he expresses opinions deeply racist “The old man was a radical, nobody wanted him. He hated foreigners, especially criticized the Turks. And he treated his wife very badly, ”says Schilling.
UnemployedThe alleged murderer, who grew up in the region - the local press published a photo of a local Tobias adolescent institute yesterday in 1996 - studied Business Administration and had lived in Munich, but since early 2019 he was unemployed. Single and with just a few temporary relationships to his credit, in the middle of that year he returned to his parents' house, says Schilling.
Although "the boy", as he calls it, "did not work, had a large BMW", the car with which he allegedly committed the killing. He also used it to go to Diana Bergen-Enkheim, the shooting club on the outskirts of Frankfurt of which he was a member since 2012 and where he practiced with the weapons he had legally bought online. Nor did any alarm jump there. He was "a rather quiet guy" who never caught attention, club president Claus Schmidt told Hanau Post . "He never made any xenophobic comments" or behaved differently with partners of foreign origin. Until he decided to go out and kill those who were like them.