Unknown individuals are placing threatening flyers with religious warnings in the letterboxes of residents in the Wattenscheid district of Bochum. Residents are concerned, and the police are in the dark.
Petra Gehrmann found one of the leaflets in her letterbox. ‘It was threatening, it gave me an eerie feeling,’ she told broadcaster Sat.1 NRW. For the first two or three days, she was afraid that someone would set fire to her flat.
‘We will take revenge on the sinners’ or ‘As for the wicked, their dwelling place is the fire; as often as they try to escape from it, they will be driven back into it,’ the flyers read. According to the police, the passages refer to passages in the Koran. In the background, the outline of a mosque can be seen, with crowded shadows of people and blazing flames below. For Gehrmann from Wattenscheid, it is a threatening backdrop. She is not the only one who found this and other religious threatening flyers in her letterbox. The flyers were also distributed in the city centre.
Experts consider the flyers to be a real threat that is no longer a harmless expression of religious freedom. Kaan Ohron from the deradicalisation counselling centre Grüner Vogel e.V. says: ‘The nature of the flyers, the lack of a recognisable author, communication that is very strongly focused on threats and negative consequences. This is not positive advertising for one’s own beliefs, but rather intimidation – and that has nothing to do with religious freedom.’
Gehrmann is concerned: “Something may not happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, but perhaps in the near future, I don’t know. There are other people who have found flyers like this in their letterboxes and who have written to me on Facebook to say that they also find it very frightening, and that they are afraid. But who put the flyers through the letterboxes? The state security service is investigating. However, as Sat.1 NRW reports, the flyers are not punishable by law. So the residents are left with a feeling of powerlessness and fear.