The foreign ministry remembered Monday the victims of a 1993 racist arson attack in Germany that killed five members of a Turkish family, urging politicians and media abroad to play their roles in preventing such attacks.
On May 29 in 1993, four people aged between 16 and 23 set ablaze the house of the Genç family in the German city of Solingen in North Rhine-Westphalia, killing five people and injuring 14 others.
Three assailants were sentenced to 10 years in jail, while the other convict was handed down 15 years' imprisonment.
"Although 24 years has passed since the attack, the grief of the Turkish people is still fresh," the written statement said.
The statement also stressed that xenophobia and Islamophobia was on the rise, especially in Western Europe.
"It is our hope that tragedies like the Solingen massacre will not occur again," it added.
"In this context, we call on prominent personalities, particularly politicians and media representatives in countries where these attacks frequently take place to use uniting rhetoric, instead of divisive remarks and attitude," the statement said.
Though the Solingen tragedy put xenophobia Turks faced in Germany on the map, existence of far-right threats against Turks was swept under the rug for years to follow, as the National Socialist Underground (NSU) murders point out.
The NSU had killed eight Turks and carried out a bomb attack in a Turkish neighborhood but their crimes were only discovered, accidentally, after two gang members committed suicide in 2011.
A video belonging to the gang members showing the crimes uncovered the presence of the neo-Nazi gang, though it was apparently known to intelligence agencies, which maintained ties with neo-Nazi figures linked to the gang who served as informants for intelligence services.
The discovery of the NSU had shed light on how police, either deliberately or mistakenly, blamed domestic disputes in the Turkish community for the murders of eight people between 2000 and 2007.
Turks in Germany, largely descending from the country's "guest workers" who arrived to aid the post-World War II development boom, often complain of the racist attacks and lack of follow-up in police investigations for such incidents.
Though they are mostly non-lethal, arson attacks occasionally claim lives, like the Soligen and another arson attacks in 1992 in the town of Mölln that killed three Turks.
Racist attacks often target Turkish-run mosques in Germany. In late April, a mosque in Weil am Rhein was damaged when assailants hurled Molotov cocktails at it.
