Mehmet Kubaşık was born on 1 May 1966 in Hanobası, Türkiye, where he grew up and met his future wife Elif as a teenager. In 1991, he fled to Dortmund with her and their daughter Gamze. The couple had two more sons there. The family later became German citizens.
After suffering a stroke, Mehmet Kubaşık set up his own business. He opened a kiosk in Dortmund’s Nordstadt district, which the whole family helped to run. Mehmet Kubaşık was shot dead by the NSU in his kiosk on 4 April 2006.
Elif Kubaşık testified at the NSU trial that she had made her way to the shop that day after a neighbour had called. She saw the officers in the street, ‘I thought it was an accident.’ Everything was cordoned off. The police officers wouldn’t let her into the shop. The police then called an ambulance, and they got in. ‘My daughter was shaking and said: “My daddy, my daddy”’, Elif Kubaşık reported. The paramedic then told her that her husband had been shot in the head.
The murder of Mehmet Kubaşık was the NSU’s eighth murder. Although it was completely clear in 2006 that there were no personal connections between the victims of the series of murders, the investigations – as with the other victims in the series of racist murders – were directed against the family and social circles of the murdered man. Elif Kubaşık stated in her testimony to the North Rhine-Westphalia NSU committee of enquiry that the searches of the family’s home on the very first day after the murder had ‘put a stamp’ on them. ‘We are from the mafia, we are involved in drug dealing.’ Gamze Kubaşık told the committee ‘The police are responsible for taking away our lives for years. Maybe I could come to terms with it. Yes, my father is no longer here, life goes on.’ The police, however, had made it impossible for the family to come to terms with the crime because ‘the whole neighbourhood said, “Your father sold drugs”.’
Elif and Gamze Kubaşık continue to fight for information, for a thorough investigation of the neo-Nazi network that made the murder of their husband and father possible, and for clarification of the role of the domestic intelligence service and police. They are calling for the memory of Mehmet Kubaşık to be preserved.
