EIGHT DEAD IN JEHOVAH’S WITNESS HALL SHOOTING IN GERMANY

Fri 10 March 2023:

Eight people have been killed in the shooting at a Jehovah’s Witness hall in Hamburg, German police has said.

Police gave the figure on their website. There was still no word on a possible motive for the shooting.

The shooting took place in Hamburg’s northern Alsterdorf district.

Residents there say they received warnings on their mobile phones of a “life-threatening situation” and streets being sealed off.

“We heard shots,” one unnamed witness told reporters. “There were 12 continuous shots… then we saw how people were taken away in black bags,” he added.

Police spokesperson said they received an emergency call soon after 9pm local time (20:00 GMT)

When police arrived at the scene of the shooting in the Gross Borstel district of the city, they found people with apparent gunshot wounds on the ground floor of the Jehovah’s Witness centre, spokesperson Holger Vehren said.

Officers then heard a shot from an upper floor and found a fatally wounded person who may have been a shooter, the Associated Press reports.

Vehren said there was no indication that a shooter was on the run and that it appeared likely that the perpetrator was either in the building or among the dead.

Police said they were still working to verify that no further perpetrators were involved.

Police believe gunman among dead

Police are focusing their investigation on the motive for the attack on the Jehovah’s Witnesses centre as they believe a gunman acting alone was responsible for the deadly violence, Reuters news agency has reported.

Police have declined to say how many people were killed but said the gunman was believed to be among the dead.

Germany’s Bild newspaper reported that seven people died and eight were wounded in the shooting.

“According to the current state of affairs, we assume that there is one perpetrator,” police said in a message on Twitter.

“Police activities in the surrounding area are being successively discontinued. Investigations into the motives behind the crime are continuing.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said his thoughts were with the victims of the shooting in Hamburg.

“Several members of a Jehovah community fell victim to a brutal act of violence last night,” Scholz tweeted. “My thoughts are with them and their loved ones.”

Police calls on witnesses to come forward

Police have asked witnesses of the attack in Hamburg to come forward and upload any pictures or videos they may have to a special website.

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said investigators were “working flat-out to determine the background” to the attack.

News weekly Der Spiegel reported that the suspected attacker was a former member of the Jehovah’s Witness community who was not a known “extremist”.

The magazine, which did not cite its sources, described him as a man aged 30-40 and said he had been armed with a handgun.

Germany has been shaken by a number of shootings and violent attacks in the last few years.

In February 2020, a gunman with suspected far-right links shot dead nine people, including people from Turkey, in the western town of Hanau before killing himself and his mother.

In October 2019, a gunman killed two people when he opened fire outside a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur.

Among the deadliest committed was a truck rampage at a Berlin Christmas market in December 2016 that killed 12 people. The Tunisian attacker, a failed asylum seeker, was a supporter of the IS/ISIL group.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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