Hamburg: As many as 7 people have been killed in a shooting at a Jehovah's Witness centre in Hamburg, with the gunman believed to be among the dead, German police said Thursday.
Police have however, not given a death count, but multiple local media outlets reported that the shooting had left seven dead and eight seriously injured. The first emergency calls were made around 2015 GMT after shots rang out at the building in the city's northern district of Gross Borstel, a police spokesman at the scene said.
Police said in tweets that "several people were seriously injured, some even fatally" in the incident. "At the moment there is no reliable information on the motive of the crime," police said, urging people not to speculate. Munich police tweeted early Friday: "The police steps in the surrounding area are gradually being discontinued. Investigations into the background of the crime are continuing." The port city's mayor, Peter Tschentscher, expressed shock at the shooting on Twitter.
Police claimed that on Thursday night something had happened in the unremarkable, three-story building. According to the local newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt, Jehovah's Witnesses had assembled for their weekly Bible study.
Over 175,000 members of the Jehovah's Witnesses, a late 19th-century US Christian movement famed for its door-to-door evangelism and non-violent message, reside in Germany, including 3,800 in Hamburg. The first cops on the site discovered a number of dead bodies and badly injured people.
According to the Hamburger Abendblatt, the fire department was taking care of 17 attendees who were unharmed. Police added that after hearing a shot in the "higher portion of the building," they went to the scene and discovered a dead. The police official stated, "We have no signs of a perpetrator on the run. As opposed to this, police have "indications that a culprit may have been in the building and may even be among the deceased."
The offender was "probably" the individual found in the upper part of the structure, the official said. "We have located a lifeless individual in a community center in [Gross Borstel] which we suspect could be a perpetrator," Munich police tweeted early Friday morning. Based on how things stand right now, police believe there is only one offender, they added in a separate tweet.
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