“Do these people in Germany actually know what I went through?” asked Ibrahim Akkuş again and again at almost every meeting. In fact, many didn’t even know what had happened to him. That was exactly what bothered and hurt him the most. Ibrahim Akkuş, died on January 10th at the age of 70 from the long-term effects of the injuries he suffered in the racist attack in Hanau.
Long before the attack, his life was marked by right-wing violence. As a Kurd, he experienced persecution and fascism up close in Turkey in the 1970s. His brother was murdered there by right-wing extremists after his application for asylum in Germany was rejected. The fact that the danger situation was apparently not taken seriously in Germany at the time remained with him until his death.
Nevertheless, he continued to search for safety in Germany, which he once described as a “land of hope.” To do this, he worked for years on construction sites, from Leipzig to Nuremberg.
He finally found his home in Hanau-Kesselstadt, where he lived with his partner and his 19-year-old daughter until his death. On the evening of February 19, 2020, he was just a few blocks from his apartment at the Arena Bar. He wanted to meet his acquaintance Gökhan Gültekin in his kiosk, who was also murdered that evening. The right-wing extremist perpetrator shot Ibrahim Akkuş eight times in the Arena Bar.
“I can’t forget this day”
Despite his life-threatening injuries, he remained very precise until his death remember that evening – of the shots, the shock, the fear and how people died. After the attack, he was in the hospital for months and had to undergo multiple operations. He received prosthetic legs and was permanently dependent on a wheelchair.
“I can’t forget that day,” he said. That’s why he could only sleep with a light on at night. Sometimes he had to scream, often in tears. He was very sad, but also angry.
The feeling that he had experienced something unjust has never left him for the last six years. His anger was directed not only against Germany or the circumstances that had forced this life on him, but also against society. Until his death he felt forgotten and alone. “Nobody calls, nobody asks about me, nobody knows me,” he said in 2022. He didn’t actually want much: a phone call, a visit and “just a home and money for food.” Not more.
After the attack, the family had to move several times. His partner and his daughter lived in a non-barrier-free apartment until the end. This meant that they had to wash him on the floor, for example. For Ibrahim Akkuş that meant: hardly being able to go outside, hardly any light, hardly any fresh air. He once described his life as completely isolated, without friends: “I lie on my back in bed all day.”
The last 6 years have been filled with pain
For his relatives it meant constant care, excessive demands and exhaustion. He was ashamed of what the once “very strong man” who “was very open and friendly” had become. “I miss my former life. I can hardly stand it anymore,” he said in 2022.
He also suffered from being a burden to his family. “I’m afraid that my child and my wife will eventually hate me. They will suffer because of me,” he said in 2025. Recently he was not only getting worse physically but also mentally. Being dependent on his family at such an early age, living tied to his bed, with no prospects, destroyed him. Added to this was the poverty that occupied him greatly in recent years and put additional strain on him.
Despite everything, he kept saying: Germany was also his home. He doesn’t want to badmouth the country. “People are siblings. I wish that people don’t kill each other. That there is no hatred.”
Ibrahim Akkuş spent 46 years of his life in Germany, where he wanted to build a home for himself. The last six years were marked by the need for care, loneliness, poverty and great suffering – for himself, for his family and for his brother, who was murdered in 1980. “I have only encountered pain in my life,” he said. It’s hard to sum up his 70-year life more aptly. On Friday, Ibrahim Akkuş was buried in the New Cemetery in Offenbach.