The Hanau attacker's website, where he had published his racist thoughts and paranoid delusions, was accessed about 560 times before the night of the crime in February 2020, but due to the data retention ban, investigators were unable to determine who the site was has visited.

A witness testified on Friday before the parliamentary investigative committee of the Hessian state parliament.

The Chief Inspector of the Federal Criminal Police Office who was interviewed admitted that despite intensive investigations, questions remained unanswered.

"There was no knowledge of Tobias R. relevant to state protection in either Bavaria or Hesse," he said.

When asked whether there were any indications of the danger of Tobias R. before the crime, he denied.

The investigative committee of the state parliament deals with the bloody deed in Hanau.

Among other things, the deputies are trying to find out what the police authorities and the public prosecutor's office knew about the assassin and his father before the attack in Hanau and how it was dealt with.

On February 19, 2020, the then 43-year-old Tobias R. murdered nine people with a migration background for racist reasons.

He killed his mother and finally himself in his parents' home. The assassin suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.

According to the BKA official, there were five investigations against R., all of which were dropped.

He is said to have threatened a prostitute in a holiday apartment in Bavaria in 2018 when he showed her sadomasochistic material, a gun and a knife.

He also presented her with a kind of script in which an escort lady dies.

The alarmed police helped the terrified woman and found a smoked joint in the apartment.

The gun was not found in the apartment.

The police file, it was rumored on the sidelines of the committee, said that the police officers only took the woman's descriptions seriously to a limited extent.

According to the investigator, R. was then investigated for a possible violation of the Narcotics Act.

Since R

"I didn't know anything that night"

There were further investigations against R. in the years before, among other things, on suspicion of bodily harm, suspicion of social fraud and resistance to law enforcement officers.

However, none of the investigations resulted in R.'s data being stored nationwide.

In one case there was a note that the Main-Kinzig health department should be informed about his state of health, because paranoid schizophrenia had already been diagnosed in 2002.

However, the responsible health authority said that it had no information about it.

R. apparently decided to act in December 2019, but the official could not say whether there were concrete plans for the assassination.

Service providers who created his website technically and with illustrations would not have had any information about his plans, since they would not have had access to the texts and content.

Even at the Hanau public prosecutor's office, there was apparently no evidence before the act that R. could be dangerous.

The public prosecutor who was interviewed described in detail the course of the operation, which she described as highly professional.

When asked by the committee chairman Marius Weiß (SPD), she said: "I didn't know anything on the night of the crime.

The name R. meant nothing to me.” In the days after the attack, the lawyer acquainted herself with the background to the assassin and reported to the committee about the well-known complaint that the public prosecutor's office had received in November 2019.

In the thirty-page letter, a criminal complaint was filed against an unknown secret service.

In this letter, the assassin explained in great detail his view of the situation in Germany and expressed "pretty wild conspiracy theories".

"Any suspicion did not arise from this pamphlet," said the witness, and when asked how she would have reacted if the ad had landed on her desk, she replied: "I probably would not have had a starting point to do anything either." Questions the woman refused to have the victims autopsied, pointing to a supervisory complaint against her.

"The act could not be prevented"

This coincides with the statement of the BKA investigator, who had announced that the complaint to the Hanau public prosecutor's office did not contain the right-wing extremist passages that were later published.

Jörg Michael Müller, CDU chairman in the committee, assessed the statements of the two witnesses as evidence that the investigating authorities had not been able to recognize R.'s dangerousness based on the information available in the run-up to the crime.

"As hard as it is to bear the realization of such a despicable act, it must be said that the act was unavoidable."

The SPD pointed out that the police were understaffed during the night of the crime in Hanau and that the authorities did not communicate with each other.