The German police were investigating on Friday the shooting which left several dead and seriously injured Thursday in a center of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Hamburg, without the exact toll or the circumstances of the crime being known at this stage.
Several media, including the daily Picture who spoke of a “bloodbath”, claimed that the shooting which occurred Thursday evening would have left seven dead and eight seriously injured. But the Hamburg police did not provide any figures. “The police measures taken in the surroundings are successively suspended. The investigation into the context of the act continues, ”she just tweeted on Friday.
There would be only one shooter
After hearing a shot in the “upper part” of the building where the killing took place, the police discovered the body of “a person without life”, said a police spokesman, adding that it is “possibly” one or more of the perpetrators of the shooting.
“We have no indication (reporting) of a (any) assailant on the run,” he said. “At this stage, it is assumed that there was only one shooter,” the police said on Twitter. The Federal Office for Civil Protection lifted overnight, shortly after 3 a.m. local time, the official danger alert triggered in the event of an attack to dissuade residents from leaving their homes.
“Dead and Injured”
Jehovah’s Witnesses had been taking part in a weekly Bible study since 7 p.m. according to the daily Abendblatt Burger.
Law enforcement ‘were called at around 9:15 p.m. to shots fired at the’ three-story building, located in the Gross Borstel district, north of Germany’s second-largest city, a doorman reported. -word of the police on the NTV channel. The intervention forces “entered the building very quickly and found dead and seriously injured people there”, according to this spokesperson.
Inside, the agents also heard a shot “coming from the upper part of the building” and found another person, continued the spokesperson, stressing “not yet able to give indications” on mobile.
“The news from Alsterdorf/Gross Borstel is shocking,” the city’s mayor, Social Democrat Peter Tschentscher, reacted on Twitter. “The intervention forces are working hard to pursue the perpetrators and to clarify the context”.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are a rigorous movement regularly accused of sectarian aberrations in France.