Several shot dead at Jehovah’s Witness hall shooting in Germany-

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By Agencies

BERLIN: Shots were fired inside a building used by Jehovah’s Witnesses in the northern German city of Hamburg on Thursday evening, and several people were killed or wounded, police said.

The first emergency calls were made around 2015 GMT after shots rang out at the building in northern Hamburg, a police spokesman at the scene said.

“Several people were seriously injured, some even fatally,” police said on Twitter.

“At the moment there is no reliable information on the motive of the crime,” they added, urging people not to speculate.

Police sounded the alarm for “extreme danger” in the area using a catastrophe warning app.

Residents must stay indoors and avoid the area, police said, adding that streets surrounding the building had been cordoned off.

Police did not give an exact death toll, but several German media outlets said at least six people had been killed.

The first police at the scene found several lifeless bodies and seriously wounded people.

“We only know that several people died here; several people are wounded, they were taken to hospitals,” police spokesman Holger Vehren said of the shooting in the Gross Borstel district of Germany’s second-biggest city.

He said he had no information on the severity of the injuries suffered by the wounded. Police did not confirm German media reports, which named no sources, of six or seven dead.

The scene of the shooting was the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Kingdom Hall, a modern and boxy three-story building next door to an auto repair shop.

Vehren said police were alerted to the shooting at 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.

Student Laura Bauch, who lives nearby, said “there were about four periods of shooting,” German news agency dpa reported. “There were always several shots in these periods, roughly at intervals of 20 seconds to a minute.”

She said she looked out her window and saw a person running from the ground floor to the second floor of the Jehovah’s Witnesses hall.

Police had no information on the event that was underway in the building when the shooting took place.They also had no immediate information on a possible motive. Vehren said that “the background is still completely unclear.”

Hamburg Mayor Peter Tschentscher tweeted that the news was “shocking” and offered his sympathy to the victim’s relatives.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are part of an international church, founded in the United States in the 19th century and headquartered in Warwick, New York. It claims a worldwide membership of about 8.7 million, with about 170,000 in Germany.

Members are known for their evangelistic efforts which include knocking on doors and distributing literature in public squares. The denomination’s distinctive practices include a refusal to bear arms, receive blood transfusions, salute a national flag or participate in secular government.

Local daily Hamburger Abendblatt reported that 17 unhurt people, who had been at the event, were being attended to by the fire brigade.

Some 175,000 people in Germany, including 3,800 in Hamburg, are Jehovah’s Witnesses, a US Christian movement set up in the late 19th century that preaches non-violence and is known for door-to-door evangelism.

The port city’s mayor, Peter Tschentscher, expressed shock at the shooting on Twitter.

Sending his sympathies to the victims’ families, he said emergency services were doing their utmost to clarify the situation.

Hit by attacks

Germany has been rocked by several attacks in recent years, both by jihadists and far-right extremists.

Among the deadliest committed by Islamist extremists was a truck rampage at a Berlin Christmas market in December 2016 that killed 12 people.

The Tunisian attacker, a failed asylum seeker, was a supporter of the Islamic State jihadist group.

Europe’s most populous nation remains a target for jihadist groups in particular because of its participation in the anti-Islamic State coalition in Iraq and Syria.

Between 2013 and 2021, the number of Islamists considered dangerous in the country had multiplied by five to 615, according to interior ministry data.

But Germany has also been hit by several far-right assaults in recent years, sparking accusations that the government was not doing enough to stamp out neo-Nazi violence.

In February 2020, a far-right extremist shot dead 10 people and wounded five others in the central German city of Hanau.

And in 2019, two people were killed after a neo-Nazi tried to storm a synagogue in Halle on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.

BERLIN: Shots were fired inside a building used by Jehovah’s Witnesses in the northern German city of Hamburg on Thursday evening, and several people were killed or wounded, police said.

The first emergency calls were made around 2015 GMT after shots rang out at the building in northern Hamburg, a police spokesman at the scene said.

“Several people were seriously injured, some even fatally,” police said on Twitter.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2′); });

“At the moment there is no reliable information on the motive of the crime,” they added, urging people not to speculate.

Police sounded the alarm for “extreme danger” in the area using a catastrophe warning app.

Residents must stay indoors and avoid the area, police said, adding that streets surrounding the building had been cordoned off.

Police did not give an exact death toll, but several German media outlets said at least six people had been killed.

The first police at the scene found several lifeless bodies and seriously wounded people.

He said he had no information on the severity of the injuries suffered by the wounded. Police did not confirm German media reports, which named no sources, of six or seven dead.

The scene of the shooting was the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Kingdom Hall, a modern and boxy three-story building next door to an auto repair shop.

Vehren said police were alerted to the shooting at 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.

She said she looked out her window and saw a person running from the ground floor to the second floor of the Jehovah’s Witnesses hall.

Police had no information on the event that was underway in the building when the shooting took place.
They also had no immediate information on a possible motive. Vehren said that “the background is still completely unclear.”