Several people have been killed and others were injured after a shooting in the German city of Hamburg, officials said on Thursday evening.
According to several German media reports, at least seven people were killed in the shooting.
What do we know so far?
The shooting took place at a Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall in the Gross Borstel district at around 9 p.m. local time (0800 UTC/GMT).
“The dead all have gunshot wounds,” a police spokesperson said, without confirming the exact number of victims.
Police were alerted to the incident at about 9:15 p.m. and arrived at the scene quickly because they were “coincidentally very, very near,” a spokesperson said.
Police said the background and potential motive behind the shooting, at a Jehovah’s Witnesses event, were unclear.
Police spokesman Holger Vehren 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.
That individual may have been the shooter, Vehren said, and the police did not need to use their firearms.
Vehren said there was no indication that a shooter was on the run. He said it appeared likely that the perpetrator was either in the building or among the dead.
Multiple gunshots heard
Two onlookers told the n-tv television channel that they heard 12 gunshots. “There were about four periods of shooting,” a student who lives nearby told Germany’s DPA news agency.
“There were always several shots in these periods, roughly at intervals of 20 seconds to a minute.”
It was not initially clear if there were one or more shooters.
The city’s Senator of the Interior, Andy Grote, said special forces have been deployed to secure the area.
Residents living nearby were warned not to leave their homes amid the ongoing operation.
Hamburg’s mayor Peter Tschentscher said on Twitter that incident was “shocking.”
“I extend my deepest sympathy to the families of the victims,” he wrote.
“The forces are working at full speed to pursue the perpetrators and clarify the background.”
This article was originally published on DW.