An internal report reveals numerous deficits in police management in southern Hesse

On 19 February three years ago, Gökhan Gültekin, Sedat Gürbüz, Said Nesar Hashemi, Mercedes Kierpacz, Hamza Kurtović, Vili Viorel Păun, Fatih Saraçoğlu, Ferhat Unvar and Kaloyan Velkov were shot dead by a racist in Hanau. The police have processed their operation on the night of the crime and set down their findings in a final report nine months after the murders. The transparency portal Frag den Staat (Ask the State) has now published this 50-page “Follow-up to the Hanau attack”.

The document, prepared by the police headquarters of Southeast Hesse, is based on protocols, investigation files, completed questionnaires and a “multitude of personal conversations as well as the study of personal notes on the events of the operation”. It confirms the already known criticism and proves that the police were swamped by their own technology in addition to spontaneous problems and breakdowns.

According to the report, internal radio and telephone communication was also “permanently at capacity”. Even the police chief on duty had not been reachable, as his publicly known telephone number had been called by journalists, consular staff, “public figures” and “interested citizens”. His accessibility by other officers thus depended “on chance”, the report said. In addition, there were “application problems” with digital radio. The control centre had not issued comprehensible orders and had not ensured the necessary radio discipline. The term means the prevention of jokes, insults or other disturbances in communication.

The police command centre was also overloaded by the incoming “information in abundance” and was hardly able to verify and evaluate it, the report says. This situation could not be “fully remedied in the first three hours”. Three months before the attack, the police had put a new operational command system into service. Among other things, it is designed for parallel operations and was used for the first time in a large-scale situation during the murders in Hanau. However, the required software was not installed in all stations or the officers were not trained to use it.

The communication chaos also ensured that the public was informed only slowly. On the ground, untrained officers who were unable to speak were “put in the awkward position” of being asked for information by journalists. This “loss of interpretative sovereignty” was exacerbated by the lack of press officers.

Due to the defusing of a world war bomb near Frankfurt Airport, many police officers from southern Hesse as well as the command centre at police headquarters were otherwise tied up on the evening of the crime. However, some of the free forces were also delayed in arriving at the scene of the incident. This was because an alerting server installed for such situations was “not used due to application problems”. Many officers in everyday service also had difficulties switching to the routine of an “emergency and special situation”. For this reason, the “numerous relatives who arrived promptly at the crime scenes” were looked after by untrained officers.

This may be an explanation for the fact that family members sometimes received false information about the state of health of their relatives. This has been criticised for years by the Initiative 19 February Hanau, among others. The initiative of relatives and supporters also criticises the fact that the police were mainly concerned with the father of the assassin, while relatives of the victims were classified as a possible danger. Frag den Staat has published an internal police protocol that proves this. According to it, officers had considered the victims’ families as “potential threats” to the father and had therefore carried out “a kind of dangerous person approach”, as another note states.

Similar chaos reigned at the crime scene. For example, the Mercedes in which Vili Viorel Păun was sitting lifeless at the steering wheel was only provided with one-third all-round protection. The police or the fire brigade in the whole of Hanau did not have any more protective tarpaulins available, the police wrote. Only after hours did a patrol bring a screen, and a remaining gap was finally filled by a patrol car.

The police command staff had to “improvise to a great extent”, according to the report. Therefore, further training on technology and procedures was needed for the officers. Many of the problems should be solved by a new building for the police headquarters of Southeast Hesse in Offenbach, the report continues. The building was officially handed over two years after the attack.

Published in German in „nd“.

Image: Initiative 19 February Hanau.