Shots were fired around 9 p.m. Thursday evening in this center, located in the Gross Borstel district, north of the city.
The facts took place in the district of Gross Borstel, north of the second largest city in Germany. Seven people were killed and eight people were injured in a shooting on Thursday evening March 9 at a center of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Hamburg (Germany), police said.
In a statement released Friday morning, the community of Jehovah’s Witnesses said “deeply saddened by the terrible slaughter perpetrated against its members in a Kingdom Hall in Hamburg after a religious service”. Franceinfo returns to what we know of this shooting.
Shots fired at a Jehovah’s Witness center
According to the daily Abendblatt burger*, Jehovah’s Witnesses had been meeting since 7 p.m. for a weekly Bible study meeting. The site of the community indeed shows a meeting organized on Thursday at 7 p.m. in the district of Gross Borstelin Hamburg. “Around 9 p.m. an assailant shot at participants of an event in a church in Deelböge Street”, where the Jehovah’s Witness community event was held from 7 p.m., Hamburg police said.
According to a police spokesperson, law enforcement “were called around 9:15 p.m. to report shots fired in the building” of three floors. A local police unit, working on special operations, was near the scene and was thus able to intervene a few minutes after the calls, according to the spokesperson, whose remarks were relayed by the public radio Deutsche Welle *.
A student living near the center where worshipers were gathered reported that she had heard “four rounds of shooting”. “During these periods, multiple shots were fired, approximately 20 seconds to one minute apart,” she said, quoted by the public media NDR *. Looking out the window, “I saw a person running frantically from the ground floor to the first floor” of the building, also confided the student. At around 10:30 p.m., residents of the neighborhood received an alert on their smartphones from a “life-threatening situation”. The roads around the scene of the shooting were blocked.
Seven dead and eight injured
When the intervention forces entered “very quickly in the building”, they “found dead and seriously injured people there. according to the police spokesman. “All the people who died had gunshot wounds”. According to NDR, forensic pathologists intervened overnight from Thursday to Friday at the scene of the attack.
The shooting claimed seven victims, the police announced on Friday morning, in a first official quantified report. Four men and two women between the ages of 33 and 60 were killed, and one of the women was seven months pregnant. The unborn baby is counted among the victims, authorities said. Eight people were also injured, four of them seriously.
Suspect ‘killed himself’
According to a police spokesperson, the forces of order, once there Thursday evening, heard a shot in the “the top part” of the building, then discovered the body of“a lifeless person”. It’s about “possibly” of the author of the shooting, had specified this same source, adding not to have “of an indication of a fleeing assailant”.
Local authorities confirmed on Friday that the alleged shooter had killed himself when police arrived, after shooting dead seven people. The police therefore reported eight dead, seven victims and the alleged assailant. “The author fled to the first floor” of the building “and committed suicide”said the Interior Minister of the city state of Hamburg, Andy Grote.
“No clues” of a terrorist motive
The alleged assailant was himself a former member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses community, with which he was in conflict, police said on Friday. The 35-year-old’s motives are yet to be determined. “There are no indications of a terrorist context”said a representative of the Hamburg public prosecutor’s office.
The man, who had no criminal history, “nurtured a rage against members of religious congregations, particularly Jehovah’s Witnesses and his previous employer”explained a representative of the police on Friday, during a press conference.
The police had received in January a “anonymous letter” claiming that the suspect could suffer “a psychiatric illness without this having been certified by a doctor”, because the alleged assailant “refused to consult a specialist. Police chief says there is no legal basis to take the man’s gun away from him, says The Guardian.
* These links refer to content in German.