Munich marks 25 years since NSU murder of Habil Kilic

BR reported that around 50 people gathered in Munich-Ramersdorf on Saturday to commemorate the victims of the right-wing extremist National Socialist Underground, or NSU. The ceremony took place where delicatessen shop owner Habil Kilic was murdered 25 years ago.

Representatives of the Munich Turkish Council, the city council and the district committee joined local residents and neighbours at the memorial. Flowers were laid and a commemorative plaque honoured Kilic and the other victims. Kilic’s relatives did not attend; they live in Turkey.

“We are here to remember, not to forget and to take responsibility together,” said Gonca Onal of the Munich Turkish Council. He appealed to society to remain vigilant as violence, hatred, racism and antisemitism grow, asking what could be done to ensure that hatred and exclusion had no place.

Kilic was 38 and his daughter was 12 when two gunshots to the head killed him in his shop on August 29, 2001, in broad daylight.

Police investigations initially focused in the wrong direction, as they did in the cases of the other victims with migrant backgrounds. Relatives and people around the victims were suspected of having links to drug dealers, the mafia or arms dealers. The resulting stigmatisation continues to affect the bereaved families, BR reported.

The NSU killed 10 people between 2000 and 2007: eight people of Turkish background, one person of Greek background and a German police officer. The other victims from Bavaria were Theodoros Boulgarides from Munich, and Enver Simsek, Abdurrahim Özüdogru and Ismail Yasar from Nuremberg.

The NSU’s main perpetrators, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, died on November 4, 2011, after a failed bank robbery in a motorhome in Eisenach. Beate Zschäpe, the surviving accomplice, was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Munich Higher Regional Court in July 2018 and is serving her sentence in a prison.