“I heard a dozen shots, it was violent,” says a witness

There remains this morning a white tarp which has been erected in front of this discreet building with a gray facade and which rises over 3 floors, now guarded by two police vans which park in the street of this district in the north of Hamburg, very close from the airport and about 7 km from the city center. This is where a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses, numbering about 175,000 in Germany, used to meet two evenings a week.

>> Germany: a shooting in a center frequented by Jehovah’s Witnesses in Hamburg leaves several dead

This is where an assailant opened fire on Thursday, March 9, around 9 p.m., killing eight people, including “obviously“the probable author of the shots, the police said on Friday in a first official report with figures. The latter has “fired at participants of a community-organized protest“, police said, adding that other people were injured, “for some of them seriously“.

The witnesses who were nearby evoke several bursts of shots, spaced from 20 seconds to a minute. One of them recounts his astonishment in the middle of the evening: “I heard a dozen shots. It was from Jehovah’s Witnesses and I walked right away. I saw seriously injured and dead people being carried away in body bags. It was violent. It was twelve shots. I had never experienced this before“, explains this neighbor to Picture.

An unknown motive

In the hours that followed, the police sealed off the scene and set up a large security perimeter and asked residents to avoid leaving their homes. Quickly, the security forces searched the area for possible attackers, with boats, a helicopter and roadblocks were set up. However, on Friday, the police seem to have become convinced that there was only one shooter, a man whose motive is unknown. On Twitter, the police thus indicated that they had discovered a body “in a parish house in Gross Borstel and we think it could be an author” shootings.

According to the magazine Der Spiegel (article in German)the alleged perpetrator of the shots is a former member of Jehovah’s Witnesses, aged about 30, and he was armed with a pistol.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Friday addressed his “thoughts“to the victims of the shooting, lamenting in a tweet”a brutal act of violence“. Home Secretary Nancy Faeser also reacted on Twitter saying to herself “shocked by the terrible act of violence perpetrated in a community of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Hamburg“.