The 45-year-old Turkish citizen Fathi Khan G. shot dead six people this week in the German town of Stade. Prosecutors are treating the attack as six counts of murder, citing treachery and base motives. The victims worked for a youth welfare organization, including a women’s shelter, and for the youth welfare office.
Three of them had traveled from the Hanover region to attend what is known as a care-planning meeting. The discussion was to focus on the man’s infant daughter, who had been removed from the family after doctors raised serious concerns that she had been abused and was at risk.
The child had to be treated in hospital. The migrant was therefore already facing proceedings on suspicion of child abuse. More specifically, he is suspected of having inflicted shaken baby syndrome on the child.
As early as the spring, the man is said to have threatened and later insulted doctors who were treating his daughter. Prosecutors in Hanover, however, dropped the proceedings at the time, saying there had been no criminally relevant threat.
Investigators believe that the man arrived at the fateful appointment in Stade, where custody of his daughter was to be discussed, with a weapon he had previously obtained illegally. There was no police escort for the meeting.
According to the Lower Saxony social affairs ministry, police reinforcement is usually called in for such meetings only if the risk has been assessed accordingly in advance. Despite the man’s earlier aggressive behavior toward his daughter’s doctors, apparently no one considered it necessary to secure the meeting.
In Stade, that assessment was wrong. Six people paid for it with their lives.
The Godmother at the Wheel
The driver of the getaway car, who was temporarily arrested but has since been released, adds another explosive element to the case. According to her own account, the 65-year-old woman is the baby’s godmother.
She works for an organization that advises binational families and operates in the field of family, education and migration policy. More precisely, she works for the Verband binationaler Familien und Partnerschaften, the Association of Binational Families and Partnerships.
The association is listed as a partner in the German family ministry’s state-funded Demokratie leben! program as part of a cooperation network against racism and also receives financial support. Last year alone, it is said to have received €900,000 ($1m) in taxpayers’ money.
That gives the case another questionable dimension: employees of a state-funded non-governmental organization were apparently involved in the events surrounding the killing of six people and had also strongly supported the perpetrator beforehand.
A few days before the attack, the woman sent a 20-page letter to several media outlets. In it, she presented the conflict from the family’s point of view and made accusations against doctors, authorities and the very youth welfare office whose employees are now among the dead.
Many details in the letter cannot be independently verified because of data protection rules and medical confidentiality. What the letter does document, however, is an attempt to exonerate and defend the father in the custody case. State bodies were to be portrayed as the family’s adversaries.
After the attack that left six people dead, she was sitting behind the wheel of the Mercedes in which the suspect fled the scene. Police stopped the car by shooting at its tires. Whether she knew about the attack remains unclear. Her role in the broader escalation is nevertheless significant.
This was not an isolated father attending an appointment. Beforehand, there had been a long letter, an attempt at media mobilization and a supporter from the migration-advocacy world. Afterwards, the same woman drove the suspect away from the crime scene.
Migrants and Archaic Family Cultures
Stade exposes a problem that German authorities have played down for too long out of misplaced caution. Among migrants from archaic family cultures, state intervention can take on a different meaning than in “normal” custody proceedings in Germany, where children are removed from their families. In such environments, cases like this are also about authority in the home, male control and who has power over woman and child.
A German youth welfare office in such a situation does not merely open a file. It enters a sphere of power. In patriarchal milieus, removing a child from the family can be understood as stripping the man of control. Anyone who ignores this does not understand the danger it creates for employees of youth welfare offices and state institutions.
The German bureaucratic state is poorly equipped for this kind of brutality. It invites people to meetings and round tables, writes minutes, adjourns proceedings and relies on the participants’ ability and willingness to talk. Against men who defend patriarchal authority with violence, that is not enough. It is, to put it mildly, a romantic notion.
Anyone dealing with communities in which daughters are disciplined under headscarves and where women who break out of arranged marriages may face so-called honor killings must expect that the removal of a child will not simply be accepted.
The suspect’s background must therefore form part of any security assessment. Anyone working with migrants from patriarchal cultures must know when a custody conflict can turn dangerous. Those who ignore such risks for fear of being accused of racism endanger those who sit at the table in the name of the state.
When Help Is Treated as Hostility
Violence has long since arrived in job centers, citizens’ offices and immigration authorities. Panic buttons are part of everyday life in many buildings because aggression, threats and physical attacks in public offices have themselves become routine.
Security guards stand at the entrances to offices that decide on financial benefits and residence permits. They protect employees, serve as a deterrent and issue bans from the premises. In child protection, the situation is even more dangerous and more emotional, because there the state intervenes directly in family, children and authority.
Social workers may not exercise the coercive power of the state directly, but in such milieus they are still seen as part of its authority and are openly rejected or even attacked. The pattern has long been familiar from violence against rescue workers and even firefighters. In some neighborhoods, they are repeatedly attacked by mobs during operations and obstructed in their work. Often, they can carry out their mission of saving lives only when accompanied by police cars.
Even those who come to help and rescue are therefore, paradoxically, treated as aggressors.
The Warning Signs Were There
The killing of six people in Stade will inevitably mark a turning point for youth welfare offices, hospitals and prosecutors. It will also force employees to ask new questions about the risks they themselves face.
A man who is under investigation for possibly abusing his baby, who is said to have threatened doctors and who is demanding his child back must not be allowed into an appointment without a clear assessment of the security situation. Such meetings require police protection, secured rooms and a prior examination of the surrounding environment.
Threats against doctors need to be taken seriously and should not be allowed to vanish at the next procedural step.
The case also raises the question of how deeply supposedly neutral aid organizations in the migration field identify with the cause of their clientele. An NGO employee acting as a supporter in a conflict between family and state should not be treated as a harmless companion, least of all when she drives a getaway car away from a bloody crime scene.
The removal of a child by the state that ends in the killing of six youth welfare workers must not be filed away as routine.