NSU Murder of İsmail Yaşar

Caro Keller

İsmail Yaşar was born in Alanyurt, Türkiye, in 1955 and came to Germany when he was 23. It was there that he married and had a daughter and a son. İsmail Yaşar ran a kebab restaurant on Scharrerstrasse in Nuremberg. He was well-known and well-liked within the neighbourhood, especially among the pupils of the Scharrer School across the road, which his son also attended. In her testimony in the NSU trial, a customer remembered him as a ‘very good person, a person who loved children’.

İsmail Yaşar was shot dead by the NSU on 9 June 2005 in his kebab shop, which he had been running for six years at the time. After the murder, pupils from the school and neighbours pinned notes to the façade, laid flowers, and lit candles. This initial commemoration was quickly snuffed out by the police investigation: even after the sixth murder in the ‘Ceska murder series’, the authorities mainly investigated the murder victim and his personal circle. There was hardly any investigation into a right-wing motive, although there had, for example, previously been damage to the property for which a neo-Nazi had received a sentence of one month’s imprisonment. 

What’s more, the murder of İsmail Yaşar took place exactly one year after the nail bomb attack on Cologne’s Keupstraße. For this reason, some media also considered the possibility of there being a connection between the Keupstraße attack and the murders that followed. The background to these considerations were police investigations that referred to surveillance videos from Cologne taken before the Keupstraße attack. These videos showed the perpetrators on their bicycles, less than three minutes’ walk from the scene of the crime. A witness questioned in connection with the murder of İsmail Yaşar was shown these videos by the police before the NSU revealed itself, as she had also seen men on bicycles. The witness claimed to have ‘quite certainly’ recognised at least one of them at the time. But even this tip, which later turned out to be completely accurate, was never seriously followed up by the investigators. These leads also had no lasting effect on media coverage of the incident.

After the NSU revealed itself, remembrance of İsmail Yaşar returned to his neighbourhood. For a long time, there was no official commemoration by the city, with the anti-fascist initiative ‘Breaking the Silence’ and pupils from Scharrerschule being the ones leading efforts to put up signs and information at the crime scene. Over time, a memorial plaque and graffiti appeared nearby. In 2022, a neighbouring green space was renamed İsmail Yaşar Square, with his children in attendance. A memorial stele was also inaugurated there, and a walnut tree was planted in memory of İsmail Yaşar.



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