A gunman opened fire on a congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Hamburg, killing six people, including a pregnant woman, and wounding eight others before turning the gun on himself as police stormed the building in what authorities on Friday called the “worst mass shooting of this size” to affect the city.
Authorities in Hamburg, northern Germany, said the gunman had fled upstairs when police arrived on Thursday night before killing himself. Four men and two women were killed in the attack. Authorities said one of the women was pregnant and her 7-month-old fetus did not survive.
“It was a horrible act — and it was a horrible act,” said Andy Grote, interior senator from the city-state of Hamburg. Mass shootings are extremely rare in Germany, where gun control laws are relatively strict, and Grote described the attack as “the worst crime in our city’s recent history.” .
Police officers who responded to the first emergency calls entered the building when they heard gunshots from inside, authorities said at a news conference Friday. They saw wounded people on the ground and saw a man with a gun running upstairs to the building.
Matthias Tresp, Hamburg’s police chief, said they later switched to isolating the gunman, an approach intended to prevent others of the roughly 50 people gathered at the building from being killed.
To comply with German privacy laws, police only identified the gunman as Philip F., a 35-year-old German who, according to authorities, acted on his own out of “particular rage” against religious groups . Ralf Peter Anders, prosecutor, said there was no indication he had a terrorist motive and he had never been known to police before.
Jehovah’s Witnesses, a sect founded in the United States in the 19th century, have been active in Germany since 1902. They form a relatively small religious community of about 175,000 members in Germany, home to nearly 900 dedicated “big water rooms”. ” as the group calls its place of worship.
Persecuted by the Nazis and carefully watched by Communist secret police in former East Germany, the group struggled for decades to be granted equal status with other German religious communities. That was granted started in Berlin in 2005.
Prime Minister Olaf Scholz, who was previously mayor of Hamburg, and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier were among those who offered condolences after the shooting.
In a statement, the organization Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany said: “The religious community is deeply saddened by the horrific attack on its members at a kingdom hall in Hamburg after a church service”.
The first calls about the shooting were made to police at 9:15 pm. Residents in the area, a normally quiet neighborhood north of Hamburg, said they were stunned when they heard gunfire from the building where the religious community met.
Gregor Miebach, a student who lives across from the hall, told German TV channel N-TV: “I started filming with my phone and through the zoom feature I was able to identify that someone filming. “There were at least 25 shots that I heard.”
Authorities said a special police unit was in the area and arrived within minutes, adding that officers found the injured as they entered the building and began searching. the way up through the three floors of the building.
“After the police arrived, there was no gunfire for a while,” Mr. Miebach said. “After about five minutes, there was a single shot.”
Strict regulations in Germany limit who can own firearms and they require training and testing before they can buy guns.
Authorities said Philip F., the gunman in Thursday’s shooting, had a gun license in 2020 and was legally in possession of a firearm.
Three years ago, a 43-year-old German posted a racist video online before driving to the bars and clubs where young people from Turkish and Kurdish families lived in Germany. frequented over many generations. Shooting kills nine people.
The gunman in that case also bought his weapon legally.
In Germany, hunters, target shooters and those who can prove that they are under threat can apply for a gun license. Both medical and criminal history are taken into account before those permits are issued.
In December, German police raided the homes of a network of far-right extremists that authorities said had plot to overthrow the government. Later, the German interior minister, Nancy Faeser, said she would seek to tighten the law to make it more difficult to buy automatic weapons. There was no immediate evidence that the far right was involved in Thursday night’s attack.
