German police were searching for a motive yesterday after a gunman, believed to have been acting alone, killed several people in a Jehovah’s Witness church in Hamburg.
Police declined to say how many people had been killed in Thursday night’s attack, but said the gunman was believed to be among the dead.
The Bild newspaper reported seven people were dead and eight wounded in the shooting at the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the northern city that is home to Germany’s biggest port.
Photo: AFP
No details of the suspected killer were released.
“Bad news from Hamburg,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wrote on Twitter yesterday, calling the attack “a brutal act of violence.”
He said his thoughts were with the victims, their families and the security forces, who “have been through a difficult deployment” since the shooting at about 9pm.
German authorities are working urgently to investigate the crime, German Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser wrote on Twitter.
“We assume that there is one perpetrator,” police said late on Thursday. “Investigations into the motives behind the crime are continuing.”
Police established an Internet portal for people to upload photos and videos “of the crime or relevant events.”
Soon after the violence began, residents in the Alsterdorf district received warnings on their mobile phones of a “life threatening situation,” and the area was sealed off, the Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported.
Television footage showed dozens of police cars as well as fire engines blocking off streets, and some people, wrapped in blankets, being led by emergency service workers into a bus.
“We heard shots,” one unidentified witness told reporters.
“There were 12 continuous shots,” he said. “Then we saw how people were taken away in black bags.”
Police arrived at the scene to find several people seriously wounded and some dead.
“Then they heard a shot from above, they went upstairs and found one further person,” a police spokesperson said.
Germany has been shaken by a number of shootings over the past few years. In February 2020, a gunman with suspected far-right links shot dead nine people, including migrants 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.
WAKE-UP CALL: Firms in the private sector were not taking basic precautions, despite the cyberthreats from China and Russia, a US cybersecurity official said A ninth US telecom firm has been confirmed to have been hacked as part of a sprawling Chinese espionage campaign that gave officials in Beijing access to private texts and telephone conversations of an unknown number of Americans, a top White House official said on Friday. Officials from the administration of US President Joe Biden this month said that at least eight telecommunications companies, as well as dozens of nations, had been affected by the Chinese hacking blitz known as Salt Typhoon. US Deputy National Security Adviser for Cyber and Emerging Technologies Anne Neuberger on Friday told reporters that a ninth victim
Russia and Ukraine have exchanged prisoners of war in the latest such swap that saw the release of hundreds of captives and was brokered with the help of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), officials said on Monday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that 189 Ukrainian prisoners, including military personnel, border guards and national guards — along with two civilians — were freed. He thanked the UAE for helping negotiate the exchange. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that 150 Russian troops were freed from captivity as part of the exchange in which each side released 150 people. The reason for the discrepancy in numbers
A shark attack off Egypt’s Red Sea coast killed a tourist and injured another, authorities said on Sunday, with an Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs source identifying both as Italian nationals. “Two foreigners were attacked by a shark in the northern Marsa Alam area, which led to the injury of one and the death of the other,” the Egyptian Ministry of Environment said in a statement. A source at the Italian foreign ministry said that the man killed was a 48-year-old resident of Rome. The injured man was 69 years old. They were both taken to hospital in Port Ghalib, about 50km north
POWER PLAY: The dam is planned to more than triple the 88.2 billion kilowatt-hours designed capacity of the Three Gorges Dam, which is currently the world’s largest China has approved the construction of what would be the world’s largest hydropower dam, launching an ambitious project on the eastern rim of the Tibetan plateau that could affect millions downstream in India and Bangladesh. The dam, which would be in the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo River, could produce 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, according to an estimate provided by Power Construction Corp of China in 2020. That would more than triple the 88.2 billion kilowatt-hours designed capacity of the Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest, in central China. The project would play a major role in meeting China’s
RSS