NSU murdered Süleyman Taşköprü in Hamburg in 2001

On June 27, 2001, greengrocer Süleyman Taşköprü was shot dead in his shop in Hamburg. It was only ten years later that it turned out that the right-wing extremist terrorist gang NSU had murdered the 31-year-old. Why him?

by Oliver Diedrich, NDR.de

Wednesday, June 27, 2001:Süleyman Taşköprü works in the Hamburg district of Bahrenfeld in the shop that he runs with his father Ali. Between 10.30 a.m. and 11.30 a.m. the father is out to get something. When Ali Taşköprü returns to the store on Schützenstrasse, he finds his son covered in blood. Süleyman has serious head injuries. The alarmed emergency doctor can no longer save the 31-year-old.

It is later determined in the autopsy that Taşköprü was killed by three shots at close range. He leaves behind his family and his partner with their little daughter.

Was the crime planned well in advance?

It was only years later that it became clear that Taşköprü, like nine other people, was a victim of the right-wing terrorist "National Socialist Underground" (NSU). But why him? Was the act planned well in advance, possibly with the help of local supporters? Or was Taşköprü, whose shop was not too far from the next motorway exit, killed without much preparation and without any backers?

In the subsequent multi-year court case in Munich against Beate Zschäpe and those who knew and helped the deceased NSU main perpetrators Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos, the relatives hope for an answer.

For a long time, the police assumed the victim had a criminal background

Back to the day of the murder in Hamburg:Before he found his son dying, Ali Taşköprü told the police, he saw two men on the sidewalk who were walking away from the store. Taşköprü says he initially thought it was customers. Only later did he realize that he probably saw the perpetrators. He describes her as German, slim, about 25 to 30 years old. Apparently, the information he gave at the time was not enough for a phantom image. The police suspect that Süleyman Taşköprü could have been involved in criminal activities and the victim of an act of revenge. That the crime might have been dealing with drugs or in the red light district or extortion for protection money.

"Many turned their backs on the family at the time"

"The murder destroyed the life of this family," master hairdresser Behçet Algan told NDR 13 years later. His salon isn't far from the scene of the crime. Algan has known the Taşköprüs for a long time. In addition to the grief for the son, the behavior of many neighbors and friends was bitterly disappointing for the Taşköprü family after the crime, says Algan. "First everyone was shocked - and when the newspapers reported black money and the mafia, most turned away from the family."

The media speak of "kebab murders"

Six years after the murder in Hamburg, the police published an identikit of a possible witness to the crime. By then it was already clear that Taşköprü had been shot with a weapon that was also used in several other murders. The nine victims:all small traders who came from Turkey or Greece. The press has dubbed the series of murders the "kebab murders". The investigations are a humiliation for the families of the victims from Nuremberg, Munich, Hamburg, Rostock, Dortmund and Kassel. Again and again the police ask questions that are supposed to uncover the alleged criminal connections of the dead.

NSU gang busted after failed bank robbery

Friday, November 4, 2011:In Eisenach, police officers discover the bodies of two men in a burned-out mobile home. They are Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt. Apparently, the two had initially hidden in the vehicle after a failed Sparkasse robbery. Shortly before police officers wanted to storm the mobile, the two obviously set it on fire and took their own lives.

On the same day, there was an explosion in the apartment in Zwickau where both men lived with Beate Zschäpe. Among other things, the murder weapons used in the series of murders of migrants were found in the house. Zschäpe first flees across Germany and sends out videos confessing to the NSU, then she turns herself in to the police. An arrest warrant has been issued against her for membership in a terrorist organization. Her group, the "National Socialist Underground," according to the accusation, committed bomb attacks and murders and robberies for years to finance underground life. The Hamburger Taşköprü was also one of the victims.

The act in Hamburg:photo of the murder victim for NSU video

Back to the day of the crime in Hamburg:According to the reconstruction in the NSU trial, Mundlos and Böhnhardt came into the shop around 11 a.m. One of the two Taşköprü presumably first fired a shot in the left cheek from the later notorious Ceska pistol. The 31-year-old falls his head against a shelf. Then one of the perpetrators shoots Tasköprüs twice in the back of the head with another gun.

Before the two leave the store, they take a photo of their victim. The picture later appears in the so-called Paulchen Panther video by the NSU. The court in the NSU trial sees this photo as proof that Mundlos and Böhnhardt also committed the murder in Hamburg - and that Zschäpe was their accomplice. She was in Zwickau at the time of the crime in order to provide her friends with an alibi, if necessary, or - if the assassination attempt had gone wrong - to publish a prepared video of the NSU confessing to the crimes to date.

"What did you want from my son?"

Monday, September 23, 2013:Süleyman Taşköprü's father Ali says in the NSU trial that he came to Germany in 1972 and that his family brought him later:"My son was 31 years old, what did you want from him? We are people who stand on our own two feet. My daughter had money saved and I started the business with that money for my sons to run. We lived on our own money, what did these people want from us?"

During the course of the trial, Beate Zschäpe claimed that she did not know how and why Mundlos and Böhnhardt chose their victims - for a long time she had no knowledge of their actions. The court sees it differently - the three planned the crimes together, it says later in the judgement.

Tasköprüstrasse commemorates Hamburg NSU victims

Thursday, June 26, 2014:In Hamburg, a stretch of street is named after Süleyman Taşköprü in memory of him. Relatives of the murdered man and prominent politicians such as the then federal leader of the Greens, Cem Özdemir, the Turkish consul general Mehmet Fatih Ak and the federal government's integration commissioner at the time, Aydan Özoguz, attended the inauguration of Tasköprüstraße. Hamburg's Senator for Culture, Barbara Kisseler, who has since died, said at the ceremony that Hamburg "wanted to set an example so that the murder of a fellow citizen for inhuman, right-wing extremist motives is not forgotten." The naming of a street is always checked very carefully, "after all, street names are something like public declarations," said Kisseler.

Life sentence for Zschäpe, ten years imprisonment for Wohlleben

Wednesday, July 11, 2018:After five years, the court is handing down the verdicts in the NSU trial. Zschäpe is sentenced to life imprisonment for ten counts of murder. In addition to the nine men, the NSU had shot another policewoman. The former NPD functionary Ralf Wohlleben received a ten-year prison sentence for being an accessory to murder in nine cases. According to the court, Wohlleben had procured one of the murder weapons - with the help of the co-defendant Carsten S. The judges sentenced him to a three-year juvenile sentence because he was only 19 years old at the time of the crime. Andre E. received two and a half years in prison for supporting a terrorist organization. With the same reasoning, the court sentenced Holger G. to three years in prison.

Family members "appalled at lenient sentence"

The Hamburg lawyer Gül Pinar, who represented family members from Taşköprü in the trial, told NDR on the day the verdict was announced that the family was relieved that the verdict had been passed in order to draw a line. "However, the family is appalled at how lenient the verdict was in some cases against individual defendants." She, too, was angry at how they “smiled at each other after the verdict”. They could expect to see the light of day again soon, Pinar fears. "That was hard to take."

What did authorities know or suspect?

At the time, the lawyer again called for "a political investigation, because this process only had to clarify the guilt and innocence of these defendants in this dock". "Of course, that doesn't say anything at all about how many other supporters there were, in which social classes there was supportive approval and whether certain authorities knew or suspected something."

Demand for a parliamentary committee of inquiry

In the days after the NSU verdicts were announced, there were several demonstrations in Hamburg with hundreds of participants who also called for further investigations. The court proceedings did not fully uncover the network of the right-wing extremist group. That is why there must also be a parliamentary committee of inquiry in Hamburg. Unanswered questions from the demonstrators' perspective:How and by whom was Taşköprü chosen as the murder victim? What role did Hamburg neo-Nazis play in the entire NSU complex? What possible involvement did they have in Taşköprü's murder?

Taşköprü not the first neo-Nazi victim in Hamburg

Taşköprü was not the first Hamburger with foreign roots to be killed by neo-Nazis. In 1980, for example, there was an arson attack with serious consequences on accommodation occupied by Vietnamese refugees. Two people are burned to death in the fire that members of the "German Action" set around the right-wing extremist Manfred Roeder. There are also two dead in 1985:skinheads kill 29-year-old Mehmet Kaymakçı in the Langenhorn district with a concrete slab. A few months later, right-wing extremists attacked a group of men from Turkey in Hamburg-Hohenfelde - they beat 26-year-old Ramazan Avci to death.

Well-known right-wing extremists act in Hamburg

Hamburg has been a popular field of activity for prominent right-wing extremists since the 1970s - which is perhaps to be expected for the largest city in western Germany. At that time, Michael Kühnen was active in Hamburg with his "Action Front National Socialists", which also included Christian Worch, who later founded the party "Dierechte". Other well-known names in the Hamburg scene:the "free comradeship" and NPD politician Thomas Wulff and the "Neo-Nazi lawyers" Jürgen Rieger and Gisa Pahl.

In addition, the right-wing populist "Schill Party" got almost 20 percent of the votes in Hamburg in 2001, formed the state government with the CDU and FDP and its founder Ronald Schill became Senator for the Interior. That was a few months after Hamburg's police had started investigating the Taşköprü murder.

"Neo-Nazis were able to rule in Hamburg for decades"

Saturday, June 19, 2021:One week before the 20th anniversary of Taşköprü's murder, several hundred people are again demonstrating in Hamburg and demanding better clarification of the background to the crime. "Neo-Nazis were able to rule in Hamburg for decades," says Ünal Zeran, one of the organizers of the demo. "I'm relatively sure that there were helpers and supporters of the NSU in Hamburg." On the other hand, Zeran finds it unlikely that the perpetrators themselves had sufficient local knowledge to carry out the murder in this way. Taşköprü was probably "selected relatively arbitrarily" as the victim. "The perpetrators were concerned with the message of these acts," says the 50-year-old lawyer - namely, "that it could hit anyone" who, from their point of view, does not belong to Germany.

Is there no will to clarify?

Zeran says that in addition to the Munich trial, he would have liked a more in-depth investigation of the NSU complex - preferably by an international commission. In the case of right-wing extremist acts in particular, according to Zeran, the judiciary and society in Germany obviously like the image of independently acting "lone perpetrators". "It's possible that there was something like that with the NSU murders, that's possible," says the lawyer - but that hasn't been sufficiently clarified. In Hamburg there was not even a parliamentary committee of inquiry like in other federal states. "The city's police force is heavily influenced by right-wing conservative currents," says Zeran. And a potentially painful investigation of the background to the Taşköprü murder could end up damaging the liberal image that Hamburg likes to cultivate. "You can't explain everything 100 percent - but the will doesn't seem to be there at all."