BERLIN, June 29 (Reuters) – Five people were shot and killed at a youth welfare facility in a northern German town on Monday, and police said they had detained two individuals, including the suspected shooter.
The motive for the incident in Stade, close to the port city of Hamburg, was not immediately clear, a police spokesperson said.
The role of the second individual in custody remains unclear, a second police spokesperson told Reuters, adding that no other suspects were at large.
It is unclear how many people were injured, he said, adding that the dead were all adults.
Police believe the incident occurred at a youth welfare facility in Stade, a town of nearly 50,000 people to the west of Hamburg. Police cordoned off the area in a cobbled, tree-lined street with red brick homes, and forensic experts in white suits and plain clothes police were at the scene.
After the incident, police warned residents to steer clear of the area but later said there was no danger to the general population.
An eyewitness saw a man and a woman trying to flee the scene by car before being intercepted by police, the news site FOCUS online reported.
Mass shootings are relatively rare in Germany, especially when compared to the United States, but it has seen a spate of high-profile cases.
In 2023, a gunman in Hamburg shot dead six people before killing himself at a Jehovah’s Witness worship hall. In 2016, an 18-year-old German-Iranian man who was obsessed with mass killings killed at least nine people in Munich.
(Reporting by Gabriele Sajonz, Friederike Heine and Matthias Williams; additional reporting by Tom Sims; editing by Thomas Seythal and Gareth Jones)
