Yahoo News Hanau terror attack: Devastated father pays tribute to daughter killed in atrocity
A grief-stricken father paid an emotional tribute to his daughter after she was killed in a terror attack in the German city of Hanau.
A right-wing extremist killed nine people and wounded six others in racially-motivated shootings at shisha bars in the town before killing his mother and himself.
Mercedes Kierpacz, 35, was among the victims of 43-year-old Tobias Rathjen, who targeted his deadly rampage at people of “migrant background”.
The mother-of-two had gone out that night to buy a pizza and a drink from a nearby kiosk when she was shot dead, the BBC reported.
Her father, Filip Goman, fought back tears as he described his daughter to the broadcaster in stark but heartbreaking words.
“She was a lovely person,” he said, according to the BBC’s translation. “A lovely person with two children.
“And now she’s dead. Gone,” he added. “What else is there to say?”
The father praised the fast and professional work of emergency services at the scene, saying they “deserved praise”.
He said officers treated him and his family with decency and, after 20 hours, “we were allowed to see our daughter and say goodbye to her.”
It comes after thousands of people gathered in cities across Germany on Thursday evening to hold vigils for the shooting victims but also to express anger that authorities have not done enough to prevent attacks despite a string of incidents in recent years.
Some also called for a crackdown on the extremist and anti-migrant ideology that has crept into mainstream political debate with the rise of the Alternative for Germany party (AfD).
A top official in the centre-left Social Democratic Party, a junior partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing coalition, accused AfD of providing ideological fodder to people such as the Hanau gunman.
“One person carried out the shooting in Hanau, that’s what it looks like, but there were many that supplied him with ammunition, and AfD definitely belongs to them,” Lars Klingbeil told German public broadcaster ARD.
Parts of Alternative for Germany were already under close scrutiny from Germany’s domestic intelligence agency.
The party has rejected all responsibility for far-right attacks, including an anti-Semitic attack on a synagogue and the killing of a regional politician last year.
