# Sittensen murders

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 into the trial of the perpetrators.

## Background

The Lin Yue Restaurant (Chinese: 年余酒樓) was a Chinese restaurant located on Hamburger Straße in the centre of Sittensen, 20 kilometres (12 mi) from Rotenburg an der Wümme and 50 kilometres (31 mi) from Hamburg. The town had around 5,500 residents at the time of the crime.
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. The Lin Yue was run by married couple Danny Fan and Anny, who immigrated from Hong Kong. Their daughter was born in 2004. The Fan family was described as well-off and popular in town.

## Murders

The Lin Yue served its last customers for the day, a local couple, at around 22:30.
At 23:03, five men entered the establishment and overpowered the staff, forcing them to the ground and tying them up with cable ties. The robbers had failed to notice the head chef hiding in the kitchen and when he attempted to flee to the hallway, he was shot five times in the back and then once in the back of the head while on the ground. Immediately after, owner Danny Fan attempted to lunge at one of the assailants for attacking his wife, but was beaten with a wooden board and shot twice in the head while laying on the floor. Anny Fan was forced at gunpoint to open the safe with the restaurant's earnings and salaries upstairs. 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. Their faces were covered with pink napkins from the tables to hem the flow of blood. A total of 14 shots had been fired. Five of the victims were moved, two behind the counter, one in a pantry and two into different rooms on the upper floor.
The child was covered with a blanket and left cradled in the arms of one of the waitresses. Investigators believed the child was spared because the robbers assumed she would be unable to recognize the perpetrators due to her young age. The robbers took 5,105 euros, two computers, and 13 mobile phones. The scene was found at 0:20 when the husband of one of the victims 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

Three men and three women were killed, including the proprietors, Wing Hung "Danny" Fan (designated Body 2) and Siu Wai "Anny" Fan (designated Body 5). They were British citizens. Their ages are contradictorily given as either 36 and 32, or 32 and 28 respectively.
They employed five staff members who commuted from nearby cities:
* 57-year-old cook Wan Wong Li, cook. He immigrated from Hong Kong but kept a low profile. Like the Fans and Foong, he was known as a gambling addict. He was the first fatality. Designated Body 1.
* 36-year-old Wai Heng Foong, waitress. She illegally immigrated to Germany with her husband for financial reasons, leaving their two children in Malaysia with relatives. Foong's monthly income was unusually high for her work at 1000 euros and she was known to spent several thousand euros at casinos as well as jeweler shops. The couple lived in Soltau. Designated Body 3.
* 38-year-old Thi Kim Oanh Nguyen Janßen waitress since 2004. She first studied to be a teacher, but then worked as a weaver in her native Vietnam, then in the Soviet Union between 1986 and 1990. She immigrated illegally to newly formed Russia in 1998 but was deported a year later. Nguyen again illegally entered Russia in January 2001, this time to meet with a human trafficking ring in Moscow that smuggled her and others to Prague via truck. 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 euros for a sham marriage with a German citizen. 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.
Only the Fans, Jitloed, and Foong were immediately identified, as the rest did not carry documentation on them. Contrary to initial assumptions, none of the dead were Chinese citizens.

## Investigation

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.
At around 13:10 on 5 February ,14 hours after the murders, police in Wildeshausen stopped a rented car containing Trong Duong Dao and Van Hiep Vu for a traffic violation on B281. Dao did not have a driver's licence, and a search of his person found 0.4 grams of cocaine and 3340 euros in banknotes. His passenger Vu had four phones and 1765 euros 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 an address, phone number, the words "Zittensen" and "10d", and mixed number-letter codes written down. Dao and Vu were taken into custody. 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 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 other implicated him.
Due to pre-existing rumors about Danny Fan's possible connection to the criminal underground, media immediately suspected involvement of Chinese triads, heavily running headlines for two days about the murders possibly being the result of failure to pay protection money. Two days after the murders, the identities of two Vietnamese suspects were published, after which media speculated that the murders were instead related to Vietnamese cigarette smugglers, human traffickers, or even a broad non-descript "Asia-Mafia", as part of a drug rivalry, revenge killings, or otherwise gang-related. Police considered the possibility, but refused to confirm rumors of organised crime involvement. Die Zeit indicated that investigations were hampered by a lack of cooperation from the citizens of Sittensen, as well as the Chinese and Vietnamese community. The term "wall of silence", previously used to describe the informal code of silence amongst Vietnamese immigrants in regards to gang violence, was frequently used as a headline in local media. It was posited that the robbers had intentionally staged the murders as gangland killings to lead away suspicion.

## Perpetrators

The perpetrators were identified as two pairs of brothers and a shared friend, all living in Bremen and working for Chinese-style restaurants. Trong Duong Dao had several convictions for robbery and Phong Cao Dao had previously been convicted of assault while the Vu brothers were connected to a prior armed robbery at a Vietnamese restaurant in Essen.
It was found that the Dao brothers had gambling debts of 10,000 euros. Related to this, a Vietnamese language interpreter identified the writing "10d" as referring to Vietnamese đồng, with it being a common practice among Vietnamese diaspora in the European Union to equate one đồng with 1000 euros.
* Trong Duong Dao, 33, led and planned the killings
* Phong Cao Dao, 29, fatally shot the victims
* Van Phuong Vu, 40, acted as getaway driver
* Van Hiep Vu, 31, helped tie up victims and carry the stolen goods
* Quoc Thanh Nguyen, 40, helped tie up victims and carry the stolen goods, former employee of the Lin Yue who informed his accomplices of the layout and shifts

## Trial

The trials were held in Stade district court and ended in 2009. The main perpetrators, the Dao brothers, were both given life sentences. Van Phuong Vu received four years and nine months for aiding robbery. Van Hiep Vu received 14 years imprisonment for robbery; 14 years are the second-harshest sentence short of life imprisonment, which may always be paroled after 15 years. Quoc Thanh Nguyen was sentenced to five years imprisonment for robbery. It was initially announced that the perpetrators would be deported after serving their sentences, but this did not occur. As of 2017, only brothers Trong Duong Dao and Phong Dao Cao remained incarcerated, but had the possibilty of being freed on parole in 2024.

## Aftermath

Until the trial of the perpetrators, the surviving Fan daughter was initially put under police protection for fear that she may be targeted as a loose end. The girl's grandmother in Hanover took her in by 2009 and she was eventually adopted by distant relatives also living in Germany.
In July 2014, celebrity cook Steffen Henssler [de] received criticism for featuring Van Hiep Vu on his television show "Henssler hinter Gittern" ("Henssler behind bars"), a cooking program which claimed to have the goal of resocialising inmates and teaching them gastronomy skills for work upon release. Van Hiep Vu, a former restaurant cook, appeared in its first episode filmed at JVA Bremen-Oslebshause.