Germany launches probe into arson of Turkish supermarket

German authorities have launched an investigation into suspicions of arson of a Turkish supermarket in Gelsenkirchen.

A supermarket run by a citizen of Turkish descent was heavily damaged due to a fire that erupted on Monday night.

According to the statement by the police and prosecutor, a witness said that a man in black clothes fled the crime scene. The footage obtained by security cameras corroborated the witness' story.

Germany is home to 81 million people and the second-largest Muslim population in Western Europe after France. Of the country’s nearly 4.7 million Muslims, at least 3 million are of Turkish descent.

The Turkish community in Europe is also concerned with the rising trend of Islamophobia and Turkophobia in Western countries, calling on European states to escalate measures against hate crimes.

Germany has been recording Islamophobic crimes separately since 2017. In 2018, there were 910 incidents, including 48 attacks on mosques alone, a little lower than in 2017 with 1,095 crimes. In 2019, some 871 attacks targeted the Muslim community in Germany, while 2020’s data has not yet been announced. Every other day throughout the course of 2019, a mosque, a Muslim institution or a religious representative in Germany was targeted in anti-Muslim attacks. More than 90% of these were attributed to politically motivated crimes by the far-right.

Turkish officials, including President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have frequently urged European decision-makers and politicians to take a stance against racism and other types of discrimination that have threatened the lives of millions of people living within the bloc’s borders.