Hesse: ex-bar operator fails before the Administrative Court

Kassel (dpa/lhe) – The city of Hanau rightly prohibited the former operator of the Arena Bar, which was one of the scenes of the racist attack on February 19, 2020, from running two other restaurants. With this decision, the Hessian Administrative Court on Wednesday rejected the man’s complaints against two decisions by the Frankfurt Administrative Court of August 11 of this year. (AZ.: 6 B 1526/22 and 6 B 1528/22)

Due to numerous legal violations in the years 2016 to 2018, the city of Hanau had already banned the man from operating the Arena Bar with a decision dated August 20, 2018, the VGH explained. A lawsuit against it was unsuccessful. From the point of view of the Administrative Court, the city rightly assumed that the man was unreliable. On May 9 of this year, the city also banned him from running the restaurant business in two other cafés in Hanau and justified this by saying that he had continued to run the Arena Bar through a straw man, which was also convincingly established in the course of the public prosecutor’s investigation into the attack according to the VGH. In addition, during police checks in the two cafés from 2020 to 2022, significant violations of the Corona protection regulations were found.

In the reasoning, the Administrative Court also referred to the bar’s emergency exit, which “was repeatedly locked in the years before the attack.” The situation on the day of the crime in the bar, where five people died, was not the subject of the VGH proceedings, a spokesman said on request. The decisions are not contestable.

A 43-year-old German shot nine people with racist motives in Hanau on February 19, 2020. He then killed his mother and himself. The emergency exit was the subject of investigations by the public prosecutor and was also discussed several times in the investigative committee of the Hessian state parliament. Survivors and relatives of victims of the attack had stated that the bar’s emergency exit was intentionally locked. The public prosecutor’s office investigated the allegations, but discontinued the investigation in the summer of 2021. Accordingly, there were no concrete indications that police officers or employees of the public order office had ordered or tolerated the locking of the door. The committee of inquiry is to clarify whether there were any errors by the authorities around the crime.