A gunman shot dead seven people at a Jehovah’s Witness church centre in Germany yesterday, before turning the weapon on himself, police say.
The scene of the shooting was a Kingdom Hall, next to a car repair shop in the Gross Borstel district, a few miles from Hamburg city centre.
Police spokesman Holger Vehren said officers were alerted to the shooting at about 9.15pm and on the scene quickly.
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 the gunman, he said.
Police believe the gunman acted alone. A motive for the shooting has still not been declared.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a former Hamburg mayor, described the shooting as “a brutal act of violence.”
“My deepest condolences to the families of the victims,” Hamburg mayor Peter Tschentscher wrote on Twitter yesterday.
David Semonian, a US-based spokesman for Jehovah’s Witnesses, said in a statement early on Friday that members “worldwide grieve for the victims of this traumatic event”.
