Assault-rifle assailant guns down doorman at German nightclub

ONE person was killed and three seriously injured when a gunman burst in to a packed nightclub in southern Germany and opened fire with an assault rifle in the early hours of Sunday.

The gunman, who was later killed in a shoot-out with police, was originally from Iraq but authorities said it was not a terror attack. The 34-year-old, who has not been named, had got into an argument with several staff at the nightclub earlier in the night and returned armed with an M16 rifle prosecutors said. The man killed is believed to have been working as a doorman.

The gunman had a history of violence and had previous convictions for assault and drug crimes. The club belonged to his father-in-law. Witnesses described him bursting into the Grey nightclub in the city of Constance, on Lake Constance close to the Swiss border, at around 4.30am local time and opened fire “indiscriminately”.

“The place was packed, I guess there were several hundred people there,” an unnamed witness told German television. “Clubgoers saved themselves by escaping outside or hiding,” a police spokesman said.

The attack lasted several minutes. Police special forces rushed to the scene and exchanged fire with the gunman as he attempted to leave the club. He was shot and died of his injuries in hospital. One officer was shot but was saved from serious injury by his protective vest.

“The perpetrator is believed to have had a dispute with employees at the nightclub. He then went home, collected an M16 assault rifle and shot the doorman,” a spokesman for prosecutors said. The gunman was of Iraqi Kurdish origin, but had lived in the city for more than 15 years. He was not an asylum seeker.

Uli Burchardt, the mayor of Constance, said: “My thoughts are with the injured and the relatives of the victims, and also with the club-goers who had to experience death and despair.”

The incident follows a multiple stabbing at a supermarket in Hamburg on Friday. One person was killed and six injured when a rejected Palestinian asylum seeker attacked several people with a knife. He was known to police for extremist Islamist views.