Murders happen around the world every day, but it’s still eerie to see murder occur at a place you are familiar with; a place where you frequently are as well. A point-blank murder at Frankfurt HbF (central station) shows that even Germany’s financial hub is not immune from gun violence.
Murder At Frankfurt Central Railway Station
The incident occurred Tuesday night on a busy railway platform…a platform that I stood on often when I lived in Frankfurt for nearly two years. From this terminus, you can reach much of Europe…
But for the 27-year-old victim, standing on platform 9 at about 9:00 pm, he never made out of the station…instead he was shot by a 54-year-old man at point-blank range. All of it was clearly captured on CCTV, which I will not embed here or even link to, but it is fairly easy to find.
The victim died instantly while the man was quickly apprehended while he tried to flee. There is no motive assigned yet to the murderer, though both men were Turkish nationals.
The station only closed for 25 minutes while police searched for the murder weapon (a pistol) and found it.
Murders happen every day and they are not a usual news headline on Live And Let’s Fly. But this murder rather smashes my naive idealization of Frankfurt as a place in which I never had to worry about gun violence and could feel safe walking even in the middle of the night.
And for goodness’ sake, don’t make this a pile-on about how bad the USA is. I’ve lamented US gun laws here before and my point here is not to make a comparative argument (yes, you are much less statistically safe in just about any US city) but merely to remark that murder seems a little different when it occurs in a place you are very familiar with.
Here’s a picture I took on track 9 at FRA HbF in 2015
So as I always say when discussing bad news: life is short and life is sweet. You never know when you may be caught in the crosshairs of violence. Always be vigilant, even in Frankfurt. My condolences to the family of the deceased.
It was like 5 years ago that an 8-year old was killed at the Frankfurt H station because of some lunatic who shoved him and his mother onto the train tracks or something like that.
Doesn’t this shooting incident with several shots aimed at the same person seem more like a deliberately targeted killing or a part of a dispute of some sort?
Yep. Sounds like a Russian mob hit. Someone working for Vladimir Putin? Follow the Novichok…
I don’t want to be victims of Putin’s thugs. Therefore, I state for the record that Putin is peace loving and is only doing a special military operation in Ukraine to de-nazify the place. After that, it will be peaceful.
You are a weak, puny non-human being. I pour diarrhoea over Putep monkey head and over yours, too.
For the record, you are trash
Both men being citizens of Turkey doesn’t necessarily mean that both identify as Turkish nationals. As you know, there are lots of Kurds in Germany who came from Turkey but really dislike the Turkish or are disliked by the Turkish. Sometimes that results in physical confrontations out in public in Germany.
“Both men being citizens of Turkey doesn’t necessarily mean that both identify as Turkish nationals.”\
What is that supposed to mean?
They were both Turkish citizens. Not German. Turkish. Immigrants and not natives.
They could identify as aliens for all I care…
He means that they may not have German citizenship yet but doesn’t mean that they identify as Turks (versus Germans).
There are lots of claimed citizens of Turkey who are not ethnically Turkish. And many of them don’t identify as Turkish nationals whether or not they have ever had a passport issued to them by Turkey.
There is a difference between being a citizen of a country and being of the nationality of the demographic majority of a country with which a person may be said by some to have citizenship. There is also a difference between being told you are something that you accept and being told you are something that you refuse to accept. Who are you to tell a person he is Turkish if he doesn’t think of himself as Turkish? Are you a freedom-hating government or some other freedom-hater who tries to intrude into people determining their own identity for themselves?
If you paid attention to violence that breaks out on the streets of Europe, you would already know there is quite the history of fights breaking out between Kurds who are told to accept that they are Turkish (or not really a nationality) and Turks who tell the Kurds they are Turkish. Often the reports will say “they are Turkish” based on something even when it’s really been a fight between the Turkish and the Kurds.
In Germany there are lots of “Turkish” Kurds who don’t identify as Turkish and instead identify primarily as German or Kurdish-German with or without German citizenship. When it comes to reported crime committed by “immigrants” in Europe, the more obvious criminality is most typically over-represented by the “native-born” children of “immigrants” than the “immigrants” who came for work, stayed and gave birth locally to future generations.
As a German/American that has lived in Germany for years, I can say that even though this is a tragic event it certainly is not the norm in Germany like it is in the US. When something like this happens in Germany it is a BIG deal but sadly when it happens in the US it doesn’t even make the evening news. Gun violence in Germany is rare and they have strict gun ownership laws. I don’t want to debate those or the laws in the US here as it is definitely not the place. I would definitely feel more safe in a train station in Germany than I would in the US.
Safe up until the moment you express wrongthink. Just ask CJ Hopkins.
What is this even supposed to mean? Any place can be unsafe but statistically Germany is a very safe country.
C.J. Hopkins received a sentence for mocking the covid masks in a book cover illustration ; and a group of Haredim were disallowed onto a connecting flight at FRA . ( To say nothing of history’s Kristallnacht .)
What it means is don’t be surprised in Germany . ( I can personally attest to a nervous encounter with railway officialdom in Germany .)
@Bob … Good point . Germany and elsewhere do not tolerate “wrongthink” nor “satire” .
“both men were Turkish nationals.” This was definitely targeted and both either knew each other before or one was hired to kill the other. This does not make Frankfurt more dangerous.
@Santistico … what currently makes FRA dangerous are the many many third world arrivals . Same as what makes El Paso dangerous . That said , Germans themselves have proved themselves very murderous within Germany , against those who follow the harmless Jewish religion , harmless gypsies , harmless Czechs , harmless German dissidents , including Lutherans , etc . Think of it : the harmless Albert Einstein would have been sent to a concentration camp .
El Paso is one of the safest cities in the US . . . that it’s not is a common right-wing misconception.
You’re talking to someone who is a racist and a bigot, so expect comments like that from them.
I have been in the “scary” “brown and black”/“immigrant” neighborhoods of urban/suburban Europe a fair amount and then some. They are safe enough places unless you go out of your way to try to have an encounter to confirm your fearful biases of such an area and don’t know how to mind your own business. Are there areas in any given European country that are safer than other areas in the country? Sure, but those tend to map with socio-economic background more than being foreign-born.
And if you want to know where criminals in these parts get their guns, grenades and such, it’s almost always with a central, eastern or southern European connection that is just as European as “Alert” who seems to have Henry Kissinger-like racism about Germany/Europe baked into him at the end. Will Europe face a spike in gun violence in the years ahead? Almost certainly,as the Russian war on Ukraine pretty much guarantees that Europe will see a replay of what happened after a cessation of the war hostilities in the Balkans following from the breakup of Yugoslavia.
El Paso dangerous? Well, there are definitely more dangerous places closer to your favorite US state governors, and there too it’s not “the third world” that makes the place dangerous. The biggest source of guns for gun crimes in much of the Americas outside of the US are American guns. Not “the third world”.
You still don’t have to worry about violence in Frankfurt. This is indeed sad, but your odds of facing violence there are statistically zero. By comparison, since last Saturday (17-AUG) there have been 9 mass shootings in the USA (4+ not counting the shooter). I see people wandering around open carrying guns all the time.
There have also been 73 people killed by police in the United States so far in the month of August, many of whom were unarmed. This month, only 1 person has been killed by police in Germany.
It’s funny that violence abroad shocks us, while by basically any metric, the United States is statistically a very violent society.
There’s no quibble that the US is on a whole different magnitude of unsafe…
My point in writing this is that even safe Frankfurt can have guns and murder…which is sobering to me.
Fortunately there, it is exceedingly rare. I’d be curious to know the source of the guns.
I doubt these will be registered (legal) guns as Germany has very strict rules.
Legally-owned guns in Germany do get stolen and used for crimes sometimes. And sometimes even the non-stolen legally-owned guns in Germany do get used for crimes. But if assuming this was an easily concealable handgun, I think it’s more likely to be an illegally-possessed gun and/or perhaps not stolen (whether it was reported previously as stolen or not). But that is
A lot of the guns used in gang- and drug-related crimes in Europe have a central/eastern/SE European connection. If the Kurdish Fox ‘s gang in the Stockholm area need a new bunch guns to commit crimes, they rather routinely reached out to Germany to source the guns via Kurds or Turks connected to the Balkan and Eastern European gangs or sometimes the Spanish and Moroccan ones. One thing you can say about the more powerful drug-dealing gangs in Europe is they really like to do cross-border deals for weapons too.
What is sort of interesting is how the illegal gun traffic in Europe nowadays still sort of runs along the same routes as the international weapons trade ran around Europe when fortified cities/castles stopped being so useful to repel invading armies. But just like then, the ends of wars often meant an increase in armed banditry.
The West is unfortunately plagued with violent people , who arrive daily , and the West today is no more safer from anti-Jewish actions than it was during Kristallnacht . Lots of French Jewish people are moving to Israel for safety .
Eh, the West was already full of violence before the brown people you seem to hate arrived.
The people most in danger in Europe of a modern-day equivalent of Kristallnacht in Europe happen to be the kind of people you seem to hate: “brown and black” “immigrants” and those who dare to stand up for equal rights regardless of how someone looks or prays. You got a window into that when the lunatic right-wing mobs in the UK were destroying British hotels and British mosques earlier a few weeks ago and the under-resourced police were poorly situated to handle the problems. Those lunatic mobs in the UK were sometimes even carrying around some Israeli flags while cheering on the Islamophobic mobs who rode forward their bigotry over a crazy Christian, UK-born teenager stabbing young girls at a dance class. Is there a serious threat to the security of Jewish communities and visible Jews in Europe? Definitely. But it’s not a Kristallnacht-like threat for Jewish Europeans with all these European governments on board with an open or closeted Islamophobic ride for their own reasons. There is no more prevalent bigotry in the halls of European power and in the security forces than Islamophobia. The runner up to that is ironically China-phobia, even as they tend to be very fearful of what Russia means for Europe. The European racism directed at Jews has been overtaken and replaced by the racism directed at people from Africa and the Arab and Muslim-majority parts of the world. Antisemitism is not a big vote getter in Europe. Ask Geert Wilders, who played down his antisemitism to sell up his Islamophobia to get votes.
I grew up in hunting country and gun ownership was highly prevalent. Shooting practice was a gym class elective for me and a favorite part of summer camp was shooting practice at camp ranges. And yet back then and until Fox News became so popular in those parts almost no one carried a gun unless they were on the way to hunt or coming back from hunting. Nowadays in those same places, a lot of people have guns when going around on day to day business because of a fear of all the guns around being carried for reasons that have nothing to do with hunting. And so now lots of stores and other places of business have to put up signs saying guns are not allowed on their premises. And yet compliance with property and management rights of those lands and buildings is lousy as hell and enforcement selective if at all.
The chances of “random” encounters with gun violence for me in Europe’s “crime capitals” literally pale in comparison to the chances of that hitting me just about everywhere in the US, including the rural Midwest which used to be about as safe as any place in the world could
be. I’ve been around gun violence in Europe. But here is an example of how different it is: when the gun violence took place at a shopping mall in the far end of a European country, the country’s prime minister shows up on site. And that was a targeted killing where one gang leader wanted to take out another gang’s member but there was some “collateral damage” because the hired kid to be the assassin was a lousy shot. Our Presidents can’t even show up when 3-5 people get “randomly” shot at a given address or neighborhood because then they would have no time to actually govern from the nation’s capital and our travel-related bills for the Presidents and all that comes with the movements would too quickly run into the tens of billions of dollars.
But still it is commonly quite unsettling when deadly violence comes to a place to where you’ve been and been often — no matter how risky it is or is not that the violence impacts you or someone you know.
By the way, recent immigrants across high income countries are far less likely to have easy access to guns and make illegal use of them than the domestically born regardless of background. And violence at train stations in Europe is nothing new. It’s been going on for over a century.
When did the post turn into a discussion on Kristallnacht? Sorry but the post is about a shooting at the FRA train station between two people of Turkish decent so why the attempt to lead the discussion to a horrible historical event? It’s almost like everyone pulling politics into every post on the internet now.
Good question . Historical Germany is part of Germany , and I can personally attest to a nervous encounter with railway officials in West Germany , on a train to FRA . German railroads played a historical role “transporting” innocent people to their doom . Mention of German railroads , in German cities , brings German history to mind , including Kristallnacht . C.J. Hopkins book cover was mocking covid masks , for which he was prosecuted and sentenced . I can also personally attest to nervous encounters with civilian-attired characters in the former East Germany . Bringing up Germany makes some of us a little nervous , for historical reasons . A great and brave book was “Skeleton of Justice” by Edith Roper . Many of the same lawyers also were in West Germany after the war . The American Haredim at FRA were denied their connection to Hungary . Answer your question ?
Your nervousness might be understandable BUT this is not the right place to discuss this especially since there’s no connection of this incident to what you’re on a soapbox about. I give up and am out of this discussion.
Eisenhower , to his credit , required the mayors of nearby towns to feed the starving people in the concentration camps , and required the townspeople to walk through the concentration camps , and brought in the press and photographers to document it all . Eisenhower didn’t want the subject forgotten .
Alert, you do tend to hijack the thread for your concerns. And you might try to remember the disgusting name calling the Jewish people suffered under the natzi regime when you attempt to mock those that do not share your political agenda in this election cycle. I beg you to stop. Said with a hope for peace.
Poster like him do tend to hijack posts to spout their bigoted views and opinions.
He’s like a self-designated representative of the Fox News talking points.
There is a criminal gun violence problem in Europe too, but I would worry about it less when in Europe than I would worry about American police violence, American road rage and American “stand your ground” types in Fox News country or anywhere else in the country.
I think the Europeans are in for some rather nasty surprises with an increase in gun violence once the weapons from Ukraine more often get sent to gangs across Europe with the help of Polish and Hungarian criminal enterprises with close ties to current or precious Eastern European governments’ favorite suppliers of the Ukrainian defense effort.
There’s also been a mass stabbing in Solingen with multiple deaths.