Who should refrain from clearing up all conceivable backgrounds and possible omissions about the attack in Hanau?

The committee of inquiry set up by the state parliament on Wednesday with broad approval, except for the AfD, is essentially concerned with the question of whether the crime could have been prevented.

Wanting to know that is not only the legitimate demand of the victims' relatives, but it also strengthens trust in a democracy in which control of the executive is the duty and noble task of parliament.

Helmut Schwan

Head of the regional section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

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    However, there is a good chance that many expectations will be disappointed.

    They focus on the fact that structural errors could still be found that could have been avoided.

    On the one hand, there were those from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which would have led to the fact that a racist extremist who had weapons as a marksman went undetected.

    On the other hand, the one during the police operation on the evening of February 19, 2020, when Tobias Rathjen shot nine people in Hanau and killed his mother and later himself.

    The madness turned into racism and hatred

    As far as can be reconstructed, the forty-three-year-old believed in his vague paranoid notion that he had to protect himself and the country from a threat. The madness that had evidently built up over the years in front of the computer in the darkened room turned into pure racism and hatred that evening. He arbitrarily discharged himself against Hanau citizens who appeared to him as foreigners.

    The very extensive investigations by the Federal Prosecutor's Office have led to this frightening and banal result. To this day, nothing points to accomplices or a network through which Rathjen would have been controlled. The fact that there is still no final report from the prosecutors more than a year and a half after the crime does not lead to the conclusion that people are reluctant to present the results. The reason for the delay is rather that the relatives of those killed are given every imaginable opportunity to question the investigation.

    However, the time must come for them too when they accept that it is almost impossible to recognize everyone who is living out conspiracy theories and fantasies of violence in order to give meaning to their own existence. That is not just a job for the state. But the more people are mindful, the more likely they are to be stopped.