Germany: Memorial for Turkish victims of racist attack

HANAU, Germany

A memorial ceremony was held Monday honoring three of four Turkish nationals slain in last week’s racist mass shooting in Germany.

The ceremony for Fatih Saracoglu, Gokhan Gultekin, and Sedat Gurbuz was held in Hanau, near Frankfurt, the scene of the attack.

Attending the memorial were Turkey’s Ambassador to Germany Ali Kemal Aydin, Turkey’s Consul General in Frankfurt Burak Kararti, Turkey’s Presidency of Turks and Related Communities Abroad (YTB) head Abdullah Eren, Kazim Turkmen, head of the Turkish-Muslim umbrella group DITIB, and a number of lawmakers from Turkey’s parliament.

After the ceremony, the bodies of Saracoglu and Gultekin were sent to their hometowns in Turkey.

Gurbuz was laid to rest in Frankfurt’s Dietzenbach district.

Last Wednesday, a German far-right extremist attacked two cafes and killed nine people with migrant backgrounds in the western town of Hanau.

Four people with Turkish roots died in the racist terror attack, as did one Bosnian, one Bulgarian, one Romanian, and a dual German-Afghan national.

Germany has witnessed growing racism and Islamophobia in recent years, fueled by the propaganda of neo-Nazi groups and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

A country of over 80 million people, Germany has the second-largest Muslim population in Western Europe after France. Among the country’s nearly 4.7 million Muslims, 3 million are of Turkish origin.