Seven people have been kill. Several others injure in a shooting at a Jehovah’s Witness meeting hall in Hamburg, Germany.
Police say the gunman was alone in Thursday’s attack and is presume dead. They add that for now “there is no reliable information about his motives”.
The armed man is a former member of the religious community, aged between 30 and 40, Der Spiegel magazine reports.
The identity of the victims has not yet been identify, the investigation is still ongoing.
Police said they found a dead man at the scene. Who they believe was the perpetrator, and that the investigation is ongoing.
At around 9:15 p.m. local time (GMT) on Thursday. They were call to reports of shots being fire at a building on Deelböge Street in the Gross Borstel district. Police spokesman Holger Vehren said.
The officers who entered suffered “potentially serious gunshot wounds, some of them life-threatening,” he said.
“Police also heard gunshots coming from the upper part of the building. Went upstairs where they also found a man. So far we have no evidence that any of the perpetrators fled.”
People are believe to have gather for a Bible study when the shooting start around 9pm local time.
Lara Bauch, a 23-year-old student who lives nearby, told the DPA news agency. That “about four shots were fired – several shots were fire in each shot. The intervals last from about 20 seconds to a minute.”
He said he saw a man from his window running from the ground floor to the first floor. “The man was wearing dark clothing and was moving quickly,” she added.
At around 9pm local time, an alert was sent to the federal alert app NINAwarn, telling locals that “one or more unknow assailants were shooting at people in a church”.
Local residents have been urge not to leave their homes during the ongoing police operation.
The video shows the police escorting people out of the meeting room, some of them to the ambulances.
Andy Grote, Hamburg’s interior minister, said on Twitter that a special police force and a large number of officers had been deploy.
The reasons for the shooting were “still completely unclear.”
On Friday morning, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz described the shooting as a “brutal act of violence” and said his thoughts were with the victims and their families.
In a statement, the Jehovah’s Witnesses community in Germany said it was “deeply sadden by the terrible attack on its members after a service in the Kingdom Hall in Hamburg”.
Peter Tschentscher, the mayor of Hamburg, spoke about the shock and expressed his condolences to the relatives of the victims.
During the night, forensic experts worked at the scene. They can still be seen in their white suits in the bright interior of the parish hall.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of the Christian religious movement.
The museum was find in the Unit States at the end of the 19th century under the leadership of Charles Taze Russell. The center of the movement is in New York.
