Eleven people were killed in two shooting incidents yesterday targeting two cafes in the western German city of Hanau. Among the dead were Turkish immigrants.

Abdullah Al-Shami, Al-Jazeera's correspondent in Hanao, said that the available data so far indicates that the port wanted to inflict the largest number of victims because he went to two cafes to smoke hookahs in two separate streets in Hanao, and that they were shot in conjunction with the cafes ’leaders’ follow-up to a football match in the UEFA Champions League .

Peter Hoyt, Minister of Interior for Hesse State - to which Hanao belongs - said that the police tracked a car used to escape the scene of the attack, and reached the address of its owner, where the bodies of the attacker, 43, and his mother, 72, were found.

Poison to society
The country's chancellor, Angela Merkel, condemned the attack and suggested that it was linked to the far right, adding that racism and hatred "a poison exists in society, and they are responsible for many crimes," and Foreign Minister Haikou Maas called for intensifying the fight against "right-wing terrorism" after yesterday's attack.

The public prosecutor said that he had taken up the case because of evidence that the attack was motivated by xenophobia, and Bild newspaper reported that the suspect had expressed extreme right-wing views in letters of confession.

Two forensic workers carry a box outside a café (Getty Images)

German prosecutors added that the attack would be treated and investigated as a terrorist act.

Turkish presidency
"We expect the German authorities to make every effort to clarify the circumstances of this case. Racism is a collective cancer," Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Qalin said.

German Focus magazine quoted security sources as saying that many of the victims of the two shooting incidents were immigrants.

A number of European leaders expressed their "shock and sorrow" over the attack, including German Ursula von Derlein, European Commission President as well as French President Emmanuel Macron.

Far right
The German authorities - in the context of a large-scale anti-terrorism investigation - arrested last week 12 members of a far-right group on suspicion of planning large-scale attacks on mosques.

The far-right threat is a matter of concern to the authorities there, especially after the assassination of a pro-immigrant member of the Chancellery Party in June.