Eight killed in Jehovah’s Witnesses hall shooting

The site where the people were killed the night before is pictured in Hamburg Friday. Pic/AFP

A former member of the Jehovah's Witnesses shot dead seven people, including an unborn child, at a hall belonging to the congregation in the German city of Hamburg before killing himself after police arrived, authorities said Friday. Eight people were wounded, four of them seriously. There was no immediate indication of a possible motive for Thursday night's attack, which stunned Germany's second-biggest city, but prosecutors said there was no evidence for a terrorist link. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a former Hamburg mayor, described it as "a brutal act of violence."

Hamburg's top security official said officers who arrived just minutes after receiving the first emergency call at 9:04 p.m. A special operations unit that was nearby reached the site at 9:09 and was able to separate the gunman from the congregation, Hamburg's state Interior Minister Andy Grote said. "We can assume that they saved many people's lives this way," he told reporters during a news conference. Grote called the shooting "the worst crime that our city has experience recently."

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Officials said the gunman was a 35-year-old German national identified only as Philipp F., in line with German privacy rules. He fired more than 100 rounds during the attack. Hamburg police chief Ralf Martin Meyer said the man had a weapons license and legally owned a semi-automatic pistol. He said the suspected shooter was previously investigated after authorities received a tip that he might not be suitable to bear firearms, but was found not to have broken rules.

Police spokesman Holger Vehren said police were alerted to the shooting Thursday night and were at the scene quickly. He said that the officers found people with apparent gunshot wounds on the ground floor, and then heard a shot from an upper floor, where they found a fatally wounded person who may have been a shooter. They did not fire their weapons.

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