On the night of 4–5 February 2007, seven people were shot and killed during a robbery at the Lin Yue restaurant in Sittensen, Lower Saxony, Germany. A two-year-old girl, the daughter of the two murdered owners, was left alive. Five Vietnamese immigrants were arrested and sentenced for the murders.
The killings are considered one of the worst mass murders in post-war German history and have been dubbed the "seven-fold murders of Sittensen" and "Sittensen massacre". The investigation was marred by sensationalist reporting focusing on speculative involvement of Asian crime syndicates, which persisted well until the trial of the perpetrators.
Background The Lin Yue Restaurant () was a Chinese restaurant located on Hamburger Straße in the centre of Sittensen, from Rotenburg an der Wümme, being situated about halfway between Bremen and Hamburg. The town, connected directly to the A1 motorway, had around 5,500 residents at the time of the crime.
The Lin Yue was run by married couple Danny and Anny Fan, who both had Hong Kong Chinese backgrounds. Their daughter was born in 2004. The Fan family was described as well-off and popular in town. Later reports claim that Danny Fan intended to sell his restaurant for €200,000, with his wife Anny planning to work as a shoe saleswoman.
The restaurant name means "Year's Surplus", also translated to "one who had a lot of money left at year's end". It opened in December 1997 and was situated in a three-story mixed-use development. The restaurant, consisting of the dining area, kitchen, pantry, and employee room, was situated on the first floor. The top floor housed apartment spaces, with one being rented as an office for the Lin Yue. A driving school was operated out of the ground floor.
Murders The Lin Yue served its last customers for the day, a local couple, at around 22:30.
At 23:03, three men entered the establishment and overpowered the staff, forcing them to the ground at gunpoint and tying them up with cable ties by the thumbs and big toes, further tying some of the hostages to chairs. The robbers, two of whom were under the influence of cocaine, had failed to notice the head chef hiding in the kitchen as they only expected five employees. After stealing the mobile phones and wallets of the victims, Anny Fan was forced to open the safe with the restaurant's earnings and salaries upstairs.
Shortly after she was returned, Danny Fan, who was being physically restrained after resisting attempts to be tied up, lunged at one of the remaining two robbers. One of the robbers beat him with a wooden board, after which Danny Fan was shot twice in the head while on the ground. The action caused the make-shift face covering of the shooter to slip. Immediately after, the hidden chef attempted to flee to the hallway, being shot five times in the back and then once in the back of the head while on the ground by the same gunman. Then, Anny Fan, her daughter, and the four other staff, two waitresses and two kitchen helpers, were blindfolded and forced to the ground in the dining area. The adults were shot in the back of the head with a suppressed small-caliber handgun. Anny Fan was also choked before being killed. Before being shot, fabric such as table cloths and a shirt were put over the victims' faces to lessen the splatter of blood"Böse Menschen waren da" (2025); Hamburger Abendblatt-TV and afterwards pink napkins from the tables were used to hem the flow of blood. A total of 14 shots had been fired. The five bodies were moved, two behind the counter, one in a pantry and two into different rooms on the upper floor, while those of the two previously killed men remained in the main dining area.
The child was covered with a blanket before the shootings and left cradled in the arms of one of the waitresses. One of the robbers later stated that the child was spared because it was assumed she would be unable to recognize the perpetrators due to her young age. Also spared was a Pekingese pet dog. The robbers took €5,105, two computers, and 13 mobile phones, also searching through several rooms after the shooting, before driving to their residences in Bremen, spending the next hours at a casino. The scene was found at 0:20 when the 47-year-old husband of a waitress came to fetch his wife. He called police at 0:29, with officers arriving five minutes later. Six of the victims died at the scene while a seventh died in a hospital the following morning.
Victims Four men and three women were killed, including the proprietors, Wing Hung "Danny" Fan (), designated Body 2, and Siu Wai "Anny" Fan (née Zhang; 张小蕙), designated Body 5. They were British citizens, who previously lived in Glasgow, Scotland. Danny Fan was born in Hong Kong and raised in Glasgow's Hillhead and Garnethill areas. Anny Fan was born in Berlin to Hong Kong immigrants. The pair married in Scotland and had been living in Germany since 1992. Their ages are contradictorily given as either 36 and 32, 36 and 28, or 32 and 28 respectively.
They employed five staff members, three of whom lived in the same building as the Lin Yue, while two commuted from nearby cities:
57-year-old cook Wan Wong Li, cook since 2001. He was the maternal uncle of Danny Fan who immigrated from Hong Kong, where he used to work as a civil servant. Like his nephew and his wife, he was also a British citizen, but otherwise kept a low profile. Like the Fans and Foong, Li was known as a gambling addict. Designated Body 1. 36-year-old Wai Heng Foong, waitress. She illegally immigrated to Germany with her husband Kee Fatt Tham for financial reasons, leaving their two children in Malaysia with relatives. Foong's monthly income was unusually high for her work at €1000 and she was known to spend several thousand euros at casinos as well as jeweler shops. The couple lived in Soltau and shortly before being taken hostage, Foong was able to call her husband, who did not pick up due to taking a shower and a relative in Malaysia. Designated Body 3. 38-year-old Thi Kim Oanh Nguyen Janßen, waitress since 2004. Originally from Vietnam, she was a trained weaver who had previously lived in Russia, from where she was illegally smuggled into Germany through a human trafficking ring. On 30 January 2001, she crossed the Czech–German border on foot and applied for asylum, but only received toleration status. To prevent her deportation, she paid €10,000 for a sham marriage with a German citizen, living separate from her husband in Sittensen. Nguyen was on a call with a friend, which inadvertently recorded the moment the robbers entered. Designated Body 4. 31-year-old Rojasit Jitloed, assistant cook. Born in Thailand, he immigrated to Germany at age six with his mother and adoptive father, who was a German national. He received German citizenship, graduated Hauptschule, served mandatory military duty in the Bundeswehr and was a trained painter. He lived in Wolfenbüttel at the time of his murder. Designated Body 6. 32-year-old Ngoc Son Dao, assistant cook. Known mostly by the nickname Sonny, he used several false identities to avoid a deportation order. For this reason, Dao's background is entirely unknown, though friends confirmed that he was of Vietnamese origin. He was initially recovered alive from the pantry, but died of his injuries the same day.
Only the Fans, Jitloed, and Foong were immediately identified, as the rest did not carry documentation on them. All victims were named by 9 February. There was initially uncertainty in Chinese newspapers whether the victims were ethnically Chinese, due to many Chinese restaurants in Europe being run by Southeast Asians instead. Besides the Hong Kong-origin owners and head cook, the two waitresses were part of Chinese diaspora, being Malaysian Chinese and Hoa, the latter confirmed by a cousin. The Chinese Consulate General in Hamburg confirmed, contrary to initial assumptions, that none of the dead were Chinese citizens.
Investigation Lower Saxony State Police headed the investigation, forming an 80-person special taskforce, Sonderkommission (Soko) "Lin Yue", headed by Rotenburg Kripo chief Petra Guderian. The taskforce was expanded to over 100 officers by 16 February. Additionally, the Federal Criminal Police Office provided forensic technology to aid in the crime scene reconstruction. At the end of the investigation, the case files amounted to seven gigabyte in digitally compiled reports, or 40,638 pages.
After the crime, there was a curious discovery about the tenant of an apartment on the same floor as the Lin Yue restaurant. 25-year-old computer technician Carsten B. had been awake at the time of the murders, yet was completely unaware of the events next-door because he had been playing a first person shooter video game with head phones on, with any noise muffled further by his television playing the Super Bowl XLI. Even more baffling was the fact that the assailants had actually checked the apartment floor and forcefully kicked in two of the three doors. These apartments were empty. He only found out about the murders when police asked to check his flat to ensure none of the murderers were still in the building. The only information the neighbour could provide was that he ordered food from the Lin Yue the prior evening, less than an hour before the arrival of the robbers. Separately, residents reported seeing a blue VW Polo leaving the area. On 15 February, police also searched for a white VW T4 transporter with Bremen licence plates, the owner of which was found and questioned the same day.
At around 13:10 on 5 February, 14 hours after the murders, police in Wildeshausen stopped a rented car with Düren licence plates containing Trong Duong Dao and Van Hiep Vu during a random traffic check on A 281. Dao did not have a driver's licence, and a search of his person found 0.4 grams of cocaine and €3,340 in banknotes. His passenger Vu had four phones and €1,765 on him. A search of the car for more drugs found a torn book page that had a building plan drawn on, with the flipside having the misspelled address "Hamburger Str. 9 Zittensen", a phone number, as well as "10d", and mixed number-letter codes written down. The officers initially handed the note back, but became suspicious when Dao balled up the paper and threw it under his car seat. Dao and Vu were taken into custody. Dao's clothes were found to have traces of blood, later matched to one of the victims. It was also found that Dao had initially given the name and age of his younger brother, under whose name he had rented the car. Both denied involvement, claiming to have been at a gambling arcade in Bremen at the time of the crime. The remaining three accomplices were arrested within the coming months. The Lin Yue had been chosen for robbery only a day earlier.
Crime scene investigation, which recovered leftover shell casings and traces of clothing fiber, ended on 10 February. On 15 February, Quoc Thanh Nguyen was arrested after he was connected via a phone number, but released. On 21 May and 7 June, the brothers of Dao and Vu where arrested. On 8 June, two suspects made partial admissions, but all four of the arrested men denied firing the fatal shots. Nguyen was rearrested on 27 June after testimony by the others implicated him.
In mid-May 2007, the murder weapon was found discarded in a park in Bremen's district, while a search of one of the suspects' residences found cable ties matching those used in the killings. Although police initially suspected a 9mm calibre, the weapon turned out to be loaded with .22 calibre rounds.
Organised crime rumours