House fire in Ludwigshafen am Rhein
A house fire in Ludwigshafen am Rhein on February 3, 2008 killed nine people and injured 60 people; the approximately 100 year old building on Danziger Platz was largely destroyed.
The fire is considered the most serious house fire in Ludwigshafen after the Second World War. The fire also attracted particular attention because the dead, four women and five children, were exclusively Turks and Germans of Turkish origin. This led to speculation that it could be an arson attack for xenophobic motives. Investigators ultimately ruled out this possibility. Even months after the event, reports on radio and television were devoted to the fire , such as the SWR report Das Feuer von Ludwigshafen - Vorm Flammentod saved (end of 2008).
chronology
The fire was noticed at 4:24 p.m., immediately after the end of the joint Ludwigshafen and Mannheim carnival parade. This move took place in Ludwigshafen in 2008 and passed near the building. This enabled help from the police and fire brigade quickly after the fire broke out. The first emergency vehicles from the Ludwigshafen fire brigade were at the scene of the fire at 4:27 p.m. - just two minutes after the first emergency call was received. The first rescue operations were carried out by the police who had accompanied the carnival procession.
At 4:30 p.m., flames broke out of the roof. The fire very quickly destroyed the wooden staircase, so that it was not possible to escape from the upper floors via the stairs. Objects placed in the hallway made rescue work difficult. 47 people were rescued using ladders and a turntable ladder. Some residents jumped into the depths. Most of the later fatalities were on the third floor. There is a press photo of this floor that went around the world and shows an infant being thrown out of the window. The infant was caught by a police officer and survived the fire.
The fire brigade was only able to penetrate the building for three to four minutes before it became too dangerous there. The extinguishing work was hindered by the fact that the water vapor would have endangered the people remaining in the house.
In Turkey , the event received special media attention because the house was almost exclusively inhabited by Turkish Alevis and there were later statements that seemed to indicate an attack. Since there was no evidence of arson on the day of the disaster, various possibilities were cited as the cause of the fire in the German and Turkish press. These included a technical defect, negligence or arson by German right-wing extremists. After the fire, investigators found SS runes on the house , which, however, as the investigation turned out, were of older origin. A neo-Nazi leader known in the city also lives in the immediate vicinity of the scene of the accident. At that time, an attack by extremist Turkish circles or ultra-orthodox Sunnis against Alevis could not be ruled out either. On the ground floor there was an empty restaurant that was attacked with incendiary devices in August 2006.
Due to the carnival parade, there was a stronger police presence in the vicinity of the house. This was seen in media reports as an indication of an attack. A local resident said:
- “A police patrol was standing in front of the house the whole time. Nobody could get in there without being seen. "
Two little girls who claim to have seen a man ignite were interrogated. According to an emergency doctor, one of the rescued children also heard a loud bang. Due to contradicting statements made by the children in the police questioning, their information could not be used as hoped for the creation of a phantom image. All statements and traces were documented by the police in order to be able to fall back on them if necessary.
The police in Ludwigshafen am Rhein were supported by investigators from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), the Rhineland-Palatinate State Criminal Police Office (LKA) and Turkish fire investigators due to the special public interest in clearing up the case .
A Turkish Airlines plane with a Minister of State on board brought the nine dead and their families from Germany to Turkey ; the dead were buried in the city of Gaziantep .
On February 28, the investigative authorities informed about the intermediate status of their investigations. According to this, a smoldering fire under the cellar stairs, the cause of which was and is unclear, is the cause of the fire. The investigators found no evidence of fire accelerators . A technical defect is excluded.
On March 4, the public prosecutor's office announced another interim status at a press conference. According to this, technical causes of fire were excluded. There are also no indications of a xenophobic attack; The most likely cause of the fire is assumed to be negligent action. The original statements of the two girls, who were initially seen as possible eyewitnesses to an arson, would have turned out to be incorrect in the course of further psychological and police interviews.
On July 23, 2008, the prosecutor announced the end of the investigation. The cause remains unexplained. An intentional arson or even an arson attack was ruled out with a probability bordering on certainty. The public prosecutor's office assumes negligence. The fire broke out on the wooden stairs from a heat source, which led to a smoldering fire. There were no electrical cables or devices at the source of the fire .
The house was demolished in August 2009; a new building has been located there since 2010.
Reactions
Numerous German and Turkish politicians such as the Rhineland-Palatinate Prime Minister Kurt Beck , Maria Böhmer , the migration commissioner elected to the German Bundestag in the Ludwigshafen / Frankenthal constituency, or the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited the scene of the fire and expressed condolences to the mourners.
The Turkish media quickly suspected that it might be an arson attack and reported that the German police and fire brigade had not acted quickly enough. Turkish media falsely claim that it took the rescue workers 20 minutes to get to the scene of the accident. This caused unrest in the Turkish community of Ludwigshafen and led to a fire fighter in Limburgerhof being beaten by a 37-year-old Turk in a restaurant and employees of the Technical Relief Organization (THW) were spat at while cleaning up. The Ludwigshafen police chief Wolfgang Fromm then suggested to want to provide personal protection for the fire fighters, and said: "It is not acceptable that these people are insulted, threatened and spat upon." Here rescuers would be made perpetrators.
In view of the allegations that the rescue work would have started more quickly if the house had been inhabited by Germans, the German Fire Brigade Association announced that it would "promote the integration of migrants into the fire service" in order to improve communication with those affected and to strengthen fire protection awareness-raising .
The Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan visited the scene of the fire on February 7th together with Kurt Beck and provided the German investigators with a team of four experts to clarify the cause of the fire and a situation such as B. to be avoided after the Lübeck arson attack in 1996. Federal Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble welcomed this.
In the first 17 days after the fire, there were further fires in Germany in residential buildings that were primarily inhabited by Turks, which were reported in great detail in the Turkish press in connection with the Ludwigshafen fire and which continued to spread in the Turkish community kept alive strong suspicions that it could be a xenophobic attack in Ludwigshafen am Rhein. For example, the Cumhuriyet asked : “Are the fires in the 6 houses mostly inhabited by Turks a coincidence in 17 days?” In view of a dozen fires within three weeks (including clear arson), Dilek Zaptçıoğlu spoke of “systematic arson attacks against Turks”. In particular on the night of February 18-19, 2007, a fire was started in Dautphetal near Marburg ( Hesse ) on a house inhabited by a Turkish family. The wooden facade of the wooden stairs attached to the outside of the house was damaged. According to the police's initial findings, however, fire accelerators were not used. The word “Hass” was also left on the facade of the affected house with crayons.
The ARD postponed an episode of the crime series Tatort scheduled for the Sunday after the disaster out of respect for the victims of Ludwigshafen . The fictional case dealt with in the following was supposed to take place in the Turkish community of Ludwigshafen.
Due to the tragic events in Ludwigshafen am Rhein and on the initiative of Asım Güzelbey , the mayor of Gazianteps , a town partnership was established between the two cities on April 1, 2009.
The 29-year-old Camil Kaplan , who had lost his wife and two children in the house fire , received the Genç Prize , which was endowed with 10,000 euros for the first time, on May 27, 2008 . In future, the prize will be awarded every two years. It bears the name of Mevlüde Genç , a Turkish woman who had been hit by the assassination attempt in Solingen fifteen years earlier . According to the newspaper Die Rheinpfalz , Kaplan was honored for having found words of balance, prudence and understanding that were widely publicized despite the great loss. Kaplan had also saved a nephew by throwing him out of the fire house and into the arms of a police officer.
On December 17, 2011 it became known that in the course of the investigation against the terrorist group National Socialist Underground, new suspicions in connection with the fire had emerged. A neo-Nazi from the Ludwigshafen region is suspected of being a member of the local neo-Nazi group LuNaRa ( Ludwigshafen nationalists and racists ). The federal prosecutor's office and the public prosecutor's office in Frankenthal have denied the report that there is a connection between the right-wing extremist terrorist group NSU and the fire in Ludwigshafen.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Julia Jüttner: "Pure panic in the faces". House fire in Ludwigshafen. In: Spiegel Online. February 4, 2008, archived from the original on December 26, 2011 ; Retrieved December 26, 2011 .
- ↑ At least nine dead in a tenement fire in Ludwigshafen. Devastating great fire. In: n24.de. February 4, 2008, archived from the original on December 26, 2011 ; Retrieved December 26, 2011 .
- ^ Ludwigshafen: House fire kills nine. In: stern.de. February 4, 2008, archived from the original on December 26, 2011 ; Retrieved December 26, 2011 .
- ↑ Information from the local newspaper Die Rheinpfalz of February 5, 2008
- ↑ a b c Ferda Ataman , Jörg Diehl: Fire in Ludwigshafen - Germans and Turks fear the return of enemy images , in Der Spiegel , on February 6, 2008, accessed on December 31, 2009.
- ↑ Speech by then Prime Minister Erdogan, February 28, 2008 in Cologne ( translation of the complete speech )
- ^ Ludwigshafen smoldering fire kindled fire
- ↑ Financial Times ( memento of February 29, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) of February 28, 2008
- ↑ Reuters, March 4, 2008
- ^ Rheinische Post online
- ↑ www.rnf.de ( Memento of the original from November 18, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Information from the local newspaper Die Rheinpfalz of February 7, 2008
- ↑ https://jungefreiheit.de/politik/deutschland/2008/integration-von-migranten-in-der-feuerwehr-vorantreiben/
- ↑ Schäuble hopes that Turks and Germans will move closer together ( Memento from February 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ europress.de: Arson attacks: The series of fires in houses inhabited by Turks does not stop and the mood in the Turkish newspapers that appear in Germany is increasingly gloomy again. "Who else is protecting us?" ...
- ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of April 24, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Frankfurt Rundschau: Arson attack on the house of a Turkish family
- ↑ Spiegel: Arson at home - Turkish family can save themselves
- ^ Ludwigshafen.de: Twin Cities ( Memento from April 23, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Felix Helbig: Trace of the Zwickau terror group leads to the Rhine. In: Frankfurter Rundschau online. December 17, 2011, archived from the original on December 25, 2011 ; Retrieved on December 25, 2011 : "According to documents available to the BLZ [Berliner Zeitung], Malte R. is also suspected by the authorities of having started the fire in a Ludwigshafen apartment building in which on February 3, 2008 nine residents of Turkish origin died. "
- ↑ Suspected neo-Nazis denied because of house fire. In: swr.de. December 17, 2011, archived from the original on December 25, 2011 ; Retrieved on December 25, 2011 : "The Federal Prosecutor's Office and the Public Prosecutor's Office in Frankenthal rejected a report on Saturday that there was a connection between the right-wing extremist terrorist group NSU and the fire disaster in Ludwigshafen three years ago."
Coordinates: 49 ° 28 ′ 59 ″ N , 8 ° 26 ′ 25 ″ E