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Readers have asked about delays in calling the Hanau tragedy a terror attack. It’s a legitimate concern, but accuracy is key
Just after 7am on 20 February, a reader emailed to say the Guardian had “made a massive error by calling the Hanau tragedy a shooting and not correctly calling it a terrorist attack”. At about 9pm GMT the night before, Tobias Rathjen had killed nine people at two shisha bars in Hanau, near Frankfurt, before killing his mother and then himself. “Why on earth has this not been described as a terrorist attack? To me this shows a racial bias,” wrote another reader mid-morning.
The Centre for Media Monitoring, a project of the Muslim Council of Britain, also contacted me at lunchtime over what it described as the Guardian’s initial reluctance to call the attack terrorism. “While we understand that you may have been waiting for confirmation from the authorities, there appears to be enough evidence for it to be called an act of terror,” said the CfMM’s director, Rizwana Hamid. She said that Rathjen’s manifesto revealed white supremacist views; counter-terrorism police were investigating; and Peter Beuth, the interior minister for the state of Hesse, had said federal prosecutors were treating it as an act of domestic terror. Continue reading...