Problems with reaching the emergency number were also an issue in the committee of inquiry into the attack in Hanau. The former police chief of Southeast Hesse, Roland Ullmann, says he didn’t know anything about emergency call problems. There are doubts about that. Ullmann now contradicts them.
Wiesbaden/Hanau (dpa/lhe) – The Hessian state police chief Roland Ullmann sticks to his statements made in the Hanau investigative committee about the emergency call system in the police headquarters in south-east Hesse. The fact that there was no emergency call overflow was not discussed with him as the police chief at the time, he explained on Tuesday. With this, Ullmann reacted to media reports. The “Hanauer Anzeiger” reported at the weekend that Ullmann was involved in the issue of emergency calls during his time in Offenbach, both as Vice President and President.
The parliamentary investigative committee recently dealt with, among other things, the incomplete availability of the emergency number on the evening of the crime. On February 19, 2020, a 43-year-old German shot nine people with racist motives. Then he killed his mother and himself. The investigative committee should clarify whether there was a failure of the authorities before, during and after the crime.
The 22-year-old Vili Viorel P?un had followed the perpetrator with his car after the first shots were fired in downtown Hanau in order to stop him and repeatedly dialed the emergency number 110 in vain. Shortly thereafter, he was shot by the assassin in his car.
According to the state police headquarters, however, a distinction must be made between two different technical features of the police emergency call 110. On the one hand there is the centralized emergency call and on the other hand the so-called “overflow function” to be separated from it in the event of a high volume of calls – i.e. the forwarding to other centers if emergency calls are received at the same time. Even if this forwarding did not exist on the day of the Hanau attack at the police headquarters in Southeast Hesse, it is important to differentiate between the two technical circumstances, it said.
The centralization of the emergency call means that all calls to the emergency number 110 in the area of ??responsibility of a police headquarters arrive at the same control center and are processed directly from there. This centralization had already been completed on February 19, 2020 in all other police headquarters in Hesse, but not in the police headquarters in Southeast Hesse. According to Ullmann, the conversion should take place with the new building of the Presidium.
“Of course, in my capacity as police vice president and later as police chief of the police headquarters in south-east Hesse, I was informed that the police emergency call 110 in south-east Hesse was not yet centralized on February 19, 2020,” said Ullmann. “That was discussed at the police headquarters when other police headquarters in Hesse centralized their emergency call systems. In this context, however, the lack of an emergency call overflow was not discussed with me.”