Shooting at Jehovah's Witness hall in Hamburg, Germany; several killed and wounded, police say
Shots were fired inside a building used by Jehovah's Witnesses in the northern German city of Hamburg on Thursday evening, and an unspecified number of people were killed or wounded, police said.
It was not immediately clear how many victims there were, but Hamburg Police tweeted that there were "several people seriously injured, some even fatally."
"We only know that several people died here; several people are wounded, they were taken to hospitals," police spokesman Holger Vehren said.
He said he had no information on the severity of the injuries suffered by the wounded.
Local media footage showed a big police presence outside the Jehovah's Witnesses' Kingdom Hall, a modern three-story building.
Vehren said police were alerted to the shooting 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.
Vehren said there was no indication that a shooter was on the run and that it appeared likely that the perpetrator was either in the building or among the dead.
The Hamburg city government said the shooting took place in the Gross Borstel district. Police also said a motive was not immediately clear. Vehren said that "the background is still completely unclear."
Police had no information on the event that was underway in the building when the shooting took place.
"The reports from Alsterdorf / Gross Borstel are shocking," Hamburg Mayor Peter Tschentscher tweeted. "My deepest condolences to the families of the victims."
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