In the case of the attack on several students at a Wuppertal high school, investigators assume that the suspect committed an amok. A police spokesman said this on Thursday. A 17-year-old is said to have injured several classmates with stabbing weapons at the school in Wuppertal. Two students were seriously injured in the intensive care unit, as a spokesman for the Wuppertal public prosecutor reported. The suspect was arrested. According to police, he is also seriously injured.
The crime happened in the middle of school operations on Thursday. The Wuppertal public prosecutor’s office said the alarm was triggered at 9:55 a.m. The Düsseldorf police spoke of a total of four injured, without going into further detail about the severity of the injuries. The attack occurred at the school in the Elberfeld district near the town hall. Many police and fire departments were on site. The building was evacuated and searched. Shortly after 12 p.m., officials announced that the students were safe. The evacuation was carried out in an orderly manner. The police were informed of an emergency call from the school office, said North Rhine-Westphalia’s Interior Minister Herbert Reul.
Nothing is yet known about the perpetrator’s motive. According to the public prosecutor’s office, the suspect was critically injured. According to Reul, he was told verbally with reservations that the 17-year-old had inflicted the injuries on himself. The authorities assumed it was a lone perpetrator. Many students were affected by what happened. They were picked up by their parents and the police had set up a contact point for this.
A student told the German Press Agency that a friend of his saw two older students running down the stairs bleeding. “I thought: Maybe they got into a fight,” he recalled. But then an announcement was made asking them to go into the classrooms and lock the rooms. “We then pushed the tables in front of the door and sat on the floor at the back,” he said. “We were very scared.”
Other students reported similar things. “We had English lessons, then an announcement came that several students had been injured and that the paramedics should come to the medical room,” said an eleven-year-old student. As they waited barricaded in their classroom, someone pushed the handle and scratched on the door. The area around the school was largely cordoned off. A police helicopter circled in the air. Among the many emergency services were officers with submachine guns. Pastors could be seen.