BERLIN (TIP): Eight people including the perpetrator were killed in a shooting at a Jehovah’s Witnesses hall in the northern German city of Hamburg on March 9 evening, and several people were wounded, police said. The first emergency calls were made around 2015 GMT after shots rang out at the building in northern Hamburg, a police spokesman at the scene said.
“Several people were seriously injured, some even fatally,” police said on Twitter.
“At the moment there is no reliable information on the motive of the crime,” they added, urging people not to speculate. Police sounded the alarm for “extreme danger” in the area using a catastrophe warning app. Residents must stay indoors and avoid the area, police said, adding that streets surrounding the building had been cordoned off.
The first police at the scene found several lifeless bodies and seriously wounded people.
“We only know that several people died here; several people are wounded, they were taken to hospitals,” police spokesman Holger Vehren said of the shooting in the Gross Borstel district of Germany‘s second-biggest city.
He said he had no information on the severity of the injuries suffered by the wounded. Police did not confirm German media reports, which named no sources, of six or seven dead.
The scene of the shooting was the Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall, a modern and boxy three-story building next door to an auto repair shop.
Vehren said police were alerted to the shooting at about 9:15 p.m. and were on the scene quickly. He said that after officers arrived and found people with apparent gunshot wounds on the ground floor, they heard a shot from an upper floor and found a fatally wounded person upstairs who may have been a shooter. He said police did not have to use their firearms. (Agencies)