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10-03-2023
BERLIN/ HAMBURG: A shooting at a Jehovah’s Witness meeting hall in the German city of Hamburg has left eight people dead, including the suspected gunman, police said Friday, as the motive for the attack remained unclear.
The shooting took place at the Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall in Hamburg at around 9pm local time on Thursday where members were attending a religious service.
Police on Friday said the gunman acted alone and was among the eight fatalities.
“Eight people were fatally injured, apparently including the suspected perpetrator,” Hamburg police said in a statement, adding that several other people were hurt, “some seriously”.
Soon after the violence began, residents in the Alsterdorf district received warnings on their mobile phones of a “life threatening situation” and the area was sealed off, the DPA news agency reported.
Television footage showed dozens of police cars as well as fire engines blocking off streets and some people, wrapped in blankets, being led by emergency service workers into a bus.
Police arrived at the scene to find several people seriously wounded and some dead.
“Then they heard a shot from above, they went upstairs and found one further person,” said a police spokesperson.
The reasons behind the shooting remain unclear for the moment.
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said on Twitter that the authorities were working urgently to investigate the crime.
News weekly Der Spiegel reported that the suspected attacker was a former member of the Jehovah’s Witness community who was not a known extremist.
The magazine, which did not cite its sources, described him as a man aged 30-40 and said he had been armed with a handgun.
‘Brutal act of violence’
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a former Hamburg mayor, described the attack on Twitter as “a brutal act of violence”.
He said his thoughts were with the victims, their families and the security forces.
In a statement, the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany association said it was “deeply saddened by the horrific attack on its members at the Kingdom Hall after a religious service”.
Jehovah’s Witnesses is an international Christian denomination found in the U.S. in the 19th century.
It claims a worldwide membership of about 8.7 million.
Germany granted the denomination legal status in 2017 as a major religion.
There are about 2,020 Jehovah’s Witness congregations and 170,491 ministers in Germany and one in 498 Germans practice the faith, according to its website.
Germany has been shaken by a number of shootings in the last few years.
In February 2020, a gunman with suspected far-right links shot dead nine people, including migrants from Turkey, in the western town of Hanau before killing himself and his mother.
In October 2019, a gunman killed two people when he opened fire outside a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
