German gunman kills 6 in Kingdon Hall terror

AGUNMAN stormed a service at his former Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation in Hamburg, killing six people before taking his own life after police arrived, authorities in the German port city said.

Police gave no motive for Thursday night’s attack, which stunned the country’s second-biggest city.

But they acknowledged recently receiving an anonymous tip claiming the man showed anger toward religious groups and might be psychologically unfit to own a gun.

Eight people were hurt, including a woman who was 28 weeks pregnant and lost the baby. Chancellor Olaf Scholz said the death toll could rise.

Officers apparently reached the hall while the attack was ongoing and heard one more shot after they arrived, according to witnesses and authorities.

They did not fire their weapons but officials said their intervention likely prevented further loss of life.

Mr Scholz, a former Hamburg mayor, lamented the “terrible incident in my home city”.

“We are speechless in view of this violence,” he said at an event in Munich. “We are mourning those whose lives were taken so brutally.”

All of the victims were German citizens, apart from two wounded women who had Ugandan and Ukrainian citizenships respectively.

Officials said the gunman was a 35-year-old German national identified only as Philipp F in line with the country’s privacy rules.

Police said the suspect had left the congregation “voluntarily but apparently not on good terms” about a year and a half ago.

The man legally owned a semiautomatic Heckler & Koch Pistole P30 pistol, according to police.

He fired more than 100 shots during the attack – and the head of the Hamburg prosecutors office, Ralf Peter Anders, said hundreds more rounds were found in a search of the man’s apartment.

Hamburg police chief Ralf Martin Meyer said the man was visited by police after they received an anonymous tip in January claiming he “bore particular anger toward religious believers, in particular toward Jehovah’s Witnesses and his former employer”.

Officers said the man was co-operative and found no grounds to take away his weapon, according to Mr Meyer.

“The bottom line is that an anonymous tip in which someone says they’re worried a person might have a psychological illness, isn’t in itself a basis for (such) measures,” he said.

Germany’s gun laws are more restrictive than those in the United States but permissive compared with some European neighbours and shootings are not unheard of.

Last year, an 18-year-old man opened fire in a packed lecture theatre at Heidelberg University, killing one person and wounding three others before killing himself. In January 2020, a man shot dead six people including his parents in southwestern Germany, while a month later, a shooter who posted a racist rant online killed nine people near Frankfurt.

In the most recent shooting involving a site of worship, a far-right extremist attempted to force his way into a synagogue in Halle on Yom Kippur, Judaism’s holiest day, in October 2019. After failing to gain entry, he shot two people to death nearby.