[Mise à jour à 18h23]
Two suspects were arrested. One of the suspects is a 38-year-old man targeted by a police wanted notice. His identification came a few hours after the murder of the two police officers, a police spokesman told AFP.
Another suspect, aged 32, was also arrested without resistance, according to the investigation services, without further details at this stage.
They were arrested by special intervention forces in Sulzbach, in the Saar region, about ten kilometers from Saarbrücken.
A vast search operation had been launched on Monday morning. The motive for the murders remains to be determined.
Two German police officers were shot dead during a roadside check overnight from Sunday to Monday near Kusel. This city, located not far from Kaiserslautern, in the Land of Rhineland-Palatinate, in western Germany, is about a hundred kilometers northwest of Wissembourg.
The Kaiserslautern city police tweeted: “During a traffic check […] a policewoman and a policeman were shot dead. »
Asked by the German daily Bild, Christian Erfort, spokesperson for the local police explained: “The colleagues announced on the radio that they were checking a vehicle carrying dead game in the trunk. Shortly after, they reported that shots had been fired. »
The main suspect arrested is already known to the police. According to a security source quoted by the DPA agency, he would have fled in the past after an accident and would have a license to carry a weapon. “We assume that several perpetrators are armed,” said a Kaiserslautern police spokeswoman.
Aged 24 and 28
The victims are a man and a woman, aged 28 and 24 respectively. The young policewoman, who was still at the police academy, was on probation.
Their death sparked a wave of emotion across Germany. Reacting to the announcement of the tragedy, Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser said on Monday: “Whatever the reasons, these facts suggest an execution, and they show that the policemen and policewomen risk every their lives for our safety”. For her part, the Minister-President of the Land of Rhineland-Palatinate, Malu Dreyer, said she was “deeply shocked”.
The 38-year-old suspect is from Spiesen-Elversberg in the district of Neunkirchen, police and the Kaiserslautern prosecutor’s office said on Monday afternoon. According to the German newspaper Der Spiegel, he manages a game business in Neunkirchen, about fifty kilometers from the crime scene.
During the search, the police had urged the population not to pick up hitchhikers.