The unborn baby of a seven-month-pregnant woman was among those killed in a mass shooting at a Jehovah’s Witness building in the German city of Hamburg.
Police said the shooter was a 35-year-old German with no previous offenses who had been a member of the congregation – but left 18 months ago with ‘bad feelings’.
They also revealed that an anonymous letter was sent to officers in January saying the attacker should not be allowed to have weapons and may be suffering from mental illness.
At a press conference, Hamburg Interior Minister Andy Grote said the lone gunman in the attack rushed to the upper floor where it happened when police arrived and committed suicide.
Eight people died in the incident, including the attacker. The victims were four men, two women and the unborn baby.
Eight people were injured, four of them seriously.
There were 50 people in the congregation at the time.
Police also said that before the attacker entered the building, he shot a woman in a car outside the parking lot 10 times – but she managed to get away.
Mr Grote called it a “horrendous crime”.
He said it was “something that we haven’t experienced in the past – we see it on TV, we see it elsewhere, we’ve never seen it happen in our city.”
Police were alerted at 9:03 p.m. local time on Thursday to the attack at the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Gross Borstel district of Germany’s second-largest city.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a former mayor of Hamburg, described the shooting as “a brutal act of violence”.
