The five young men stay in the Arena Bar for nine seconds to flee from their killer.

Nine seconds to decide: should we take the emergency exit or do we run to the back of the bar?

Anna Schiller

Volunteer.

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Two of them did not survive: Said Nesar Hashemi and Hamza Kurtović were shot dead by a right-wing extremist on February 19, 2020.

That evening he murdered seven other people in Hanau, all with immigrant backgrounds.  

"The emergency exit was not an option for us because it was clear to everyone that it was closed," said Said Etris Hashemi, whose brother lost his life in the Arena Bar, on Monday before the investigative committee of the Hessian state parliament on the Hanau murders.

The focus of the meeting was a question to which the members of the committee are hoping for an answer: Could the two men still be alive if they had run to the emergency exit and it had been open?  

On Monday, the relatives and victims presented a new report to the investigative committee that was available to the FAZ.

Using the footage from surveillance cameras, a British research group reconstructed the course of events in the Arena Bar and simulated an alternative escape route.  

"All five people survived the attack"

The scientists tracked the chronological sequence in seconds with the help of a soccer game that can be seen on the television in the background of the recordings.

This results in the speed of the victims' walking.

The young men ran for their lives on the evening of the crime at more than four meters per second.  

The experts come to the conclusion that the men could have reached the emergency exit in time: In this scenario, only one of them would have been visible to the assassin for a split second.

"All five people would have survived the attack if they had thought that the emergency exit would offer them a possible escape route," says the report.  

Investigations by the Hanau public prosecutor's office had shown that the men could not have reached the emergency exit unscathed.

Survivors and relatives had filed charges of negligent homicide due to the allegedly closed emergency exit.

Public prosecutor's office has closed the investigation

Witnesses said the police approved the locked emergency exit to prevent guests from leaving the bar unnoticed during raids.

In August 2021, the public prosecutor closed the investigation because none of the points could be clarified with sufficient certainty. 

On Monday, the witnesses again criticized the work of the authorities, which they perceived as racist.

Hashemi accused the police of treating him like a perpetrator.

Despite a gunshot wound in the neck, he was asked for his personal details. 

The ambulance in which he was treated was not allowed to leave the scene for a long time, he said.

He hopes that the Hessian authorities will train their employees better about racism in the future. 

Armin Kurtović, Hamza Kurtović's father, also criticized the investigators' way of working.

For a long time he did not know where his son's body was.

The fact that, as a Muslim, he could not wash his son before the burial is a burden to him to this day.