Hanau shootings

On the night of 19 February 2020, a gunman carried out a shooting spree at two locations in Hanau, a city near Frankfurt in the German state of Hesse, killing nine people and wounding five others before killing his mother and himself. German officials, including the Minister of Internal Affairs, described the attack as an act of terrorism.

The shootings began at about 21:55 CET in central Hanau, where the gunman fired on La Votre Bar and the neighboring Midnight Bar on Heumarkt, killing three people. He also confronted a man outside a nearby kiosk, repeatedly asking whether he was a foreigner, before running off. As the gunman drove away, Vili Viorel Păun, whose car had been fired on, pursued him and made repeated unsuccessful attempts to reach police by phone. The gunman then drove roughly 2.5 kilometers to the Kesselstadt district, where he shot and killed Păun outside the Arena Bar & Café, then killed three more people in an adjacent kiosk and two others inside the bar itself, wounding three more. A later reconstruction by the research group Forensic Architecture found that patrons trapped inside the bar could have escaped if an emergency exit had not been locked.

After the shootings, the gunman drove to his family's home near the Arena Bar, fatally shot his mother, Gabriele Rathjen, 72, and then killed himself. Police entered the home at 05:15 the next morning and found both bodies. His father, who was also in the home, was unharmed.

The nine people killed in the two shootings were identified as Gökhan Gültekin, 37; Ferhat Unvar, 23; Mercedes Kierpacz, 35; and Said Nesar Hashemi, 21, all German nationals; Sedat Gürbüz, 29, and Fatih Saraçoğlu, 34, both Turkish nationals; Hamza Kurtović, 22, a Bosnian national; Kaloyan Velkov, 33, a Bulgarian national; and Vili Viorel Păun, 22, a Romanian national. Velkov and Păun were both members of Romani communities in their home countries. Among the five people wounded were two Turkish-Germans, an Afghan-German, and a Cameroonian-German. One of those wounded, Ibrahim Akkuş, died on 10 January 2026 at age 70 from complications related to his injuries.

Federal prosecutors treated the attack as terrorism and cited evidence of a far-right, xenophobic motive. The gunman had published a racist manifesto online calling for mass violence against people from a list of world regions and had recorded videos describing his beliefs. Three months before the attack, he had sent a 19-page letter to Germany's Federal Public Prosecutor General describing a conspiracy theory about a secret organization; authorities took no action in response.

The attack prompted large public gatherings, including a march by about 10,000 people in Hanau on 23 February 2020, and led the United Kingdom to proscribe two neo-Nazi organizations, Sonnenkrieg Division and System Resistance Network, as terrorist groups. German officials, including Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, publicly condemned the attack, and memorial events were held in Hanau and other German cities on the first anniversary of the attack in February 2021.