Police searched Thursday for the cause of a blaze that killed five children and four adults _ all ethnic Turks _ amid heightened tensions between the Turkish community and German officials.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan was expected to visit the site later Thursday, as part of a previously scheduled trip to Germany, to meet with the injured and the victims' families.
The building in the southwestern city of Ludwigshafen was inhabited by two Turkish families and all nine victims were Turkish citizens or Germans of Turkish descent.
The blaze has unleashed a wave of criticism from some of Germany's 2.7 million-strong Turkish community, while newspapers in Turkey have charged that German rescue workers failed to respond swiftly enough and blamed the incident on far-right extremists.
Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble urged calm, expressing understanding for the Turks' outrage while insisting that Germans were equally concerned by the high number of fatalities.
"Our shock and sadness is not determined by nationality," Schaeuble told the Westdeutsche Allgemeine local daily.
Police found graffiti scrawled on the building _ the German word for hate, "Hass" _ next to the entrance to a ground-floor Turkish cultural center in the building. But they said it had been scrawled well before the fire and was not thought to be related to the blaze.
"At this point, we don't see any connection with it and the fire," said police spokesman Volker Klein.
Turkey called for a thorough investigation has said it would send its own officials to assist. That offer has been rebuffed by some German groups who insisted that local officials need no help.
The blaze comes amid a downturn in German-Turkish relations, soured by a tightened immigration laws in Berlin and a recent state election campaign by a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative party, Roland Koch, blaming a rise in youth crime on recent immigrants.
Kenan Kolat, head of Germany's Turkish community, condemned the jump to conclusions and finger-pointing by some, but traced it to the recent political developments.
"It simply should not happen," he told SWR radio. "But the mood, such as it is, is of course due to the many things that have happened in the past months, from changes to the immigration laws and now Koch's campaign in Hesse."
As part of their investigation, police are working with information from two girls, aged 8 and 9, who have said they saw a man setting fire to something with his lighter and then throwing it next to a baby carriage in the hallway of the building.
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