Turkish boy died in an arson attack in 1990: only now terrorist investigations

Created: 01/11/2022Updated: 01/11/2022, 6:09 PM

From: Johannes Welte

The victim of the arson attack: the five-year-old Ercan © private

Five-year-old Ercan was killed in an arson attack over 31 years ago.

Witnesses are now being sought for the ZDF program “Aktenzeichen XY ... unsolved”.

Munich - It has been over 31 years since an arson attack was carried out on a house in Kempten that was inhabited by several Turkish families.

Five-year-old Ercan was killed in the process.

For decades, a letter of confession in which an "Anti-Kanaken Front Kempten" claimed responsibility for the fire attack went unnoticed.

At "Aktenzeichen XY ... unsolved", presenter Rudi Cerne is looking for witnesses to the crime on Wednesday at 8:15 pm on ZDF.

Turkish boy died in an arson attack in 1990: only now terrorist investigations

Orhan G. (name changed) was 17 when he woke up at night on November 17, 1990, after hearing his mother scream.

Smoke wafted through the apartment, strangers had started a fire in the stairwell.

The arson attack was carried out in this house.

It was later demolished © private

Orhan G. can hardly remember how he, his twin brother and his one year older sister and mother were able to jump out of the window on the second floor. The little brother is still rescued by the fire brigade, but he dies in the hospital as a result of severe smoke inhalation. The nurse suffered a fractured vertebra and was nearly paraplegic.

A few days later, the local newspaper received the “letter of confession”.

In runic writing and with a swastika next to it, the unknown authors explain that “the very successful attack we carried out on the house in Füssener Strasse inhabited by Turks was just the beginning.” They threatened: “We will not rest until Kempten von alle un-German creatures is liberated. ”Kempten will be the“ first city ”that is“ not plagued by gays, leftists, foreigners and other pigs ”.

The letter of confession does not seem to have been taken very seriously by the investigators at the time.

“Unfortunately, there was hardly any investigation in this direction at the time,” said blogger Sebastian Lipp from allgaeu-rechtsaussen.de.

“Instead, they looked for the perpetrators in the house.” It was assumed that the background to the crime was a dispute between the residents of the house of Turkish origin.

"The people behind the anonymous letter could not be found"

According to Lipp's research, articles appeared in Die

and in

in autumn 2020 .

"The people behind the anonymous letter could not be found at the time, a xenophobic motive for the act could not be proven on the basis of the investigations carried out, nor could it ultimately be ruled out," said the Kemptner public prosecutor David Beck of the time.

That the investigation wasn't back then

At the end of 2020, the General Public Prosecutor's Office in Munich, the central office for combating extremism and terrorism, resumed the investigation into murder.

A special commission was set up at the criminal police in Neu-Ulm.

Ercan's family was surprised by the new developments.

His brother Orhan zur tz: "We didn't know anything about the letter of confession, it was never discussed." At the time it was printed in the newspaper and the original was available to the police.

The family had meanwhile continued to live their lives, Orhan G. is now working as a pediatrician in West Germany, his sister and brother have also moved away, but the parents still live in Kempten.

“We moved away for work,” explains Orhan G. “Despite the deed, we felt at home in Kempten.” But the new developments stir up the family.

"The case is particularly discussed in the Turkish community," says Orhan G.

With blogger LIpp, the fact that the investigation was mainly carried out in the family environment, while a possible right-wing extremist background was not investigated more intensively, awakens memories of the NSU series of murders: “Here, the investigators did not assume a right-wing extremist background for a long time until the Outed perpetrators themselves by suicide. "

In the early 1990s there was a series of attacks motivated by right-wing extremists: eight people of Turkish origin died in arson attacks in Mölln and Solingen in 1992 and 1993. There were also further right-wing extremist attacks in the Allgäu: On October 6, 1990, three neo-Nazis carried out an arson attack on a workers' settlement in Kaufbeuren, six days later seven Kurdish residents suffered serious injuries in an arson attack on a refugee home in Kaufbeuren, and an arson attack on the same day Two residents of a refugee home in Immenstadt were seriously injured when they jumped out of the window in panic. On June 11, 1993, strangers set several cars on fire in the underground car park of an apartment building in Kempten; six of the twelve injured residents were of Turkish origin.Here, too, the police did not assume a xenophobic motive. *