Patient shoots dead doctor, kills self

‘No sign incident a terror attack’

BERLIN, July 26, (Agencies): A patient shot and killed a doctor before turning the gun on himself at a Berlin hospital Tuesday, police said, adding there was no sign the incident was a terrorist attack.

A police spokeswoman told AFP that several shots were fired at a university hospital in the well-heeled southwestern Steglitz neighbourhood of the German capital.

“According to preliminary information, a patient at the hospital shot a doctor and then killed himself,” she said.

“The doctor is in intensive care,” the spokeswoman said, adding there was “no indication this was a terror attack”.

Berlin police later tweeted that the doctor had died of his wounds.

The shooting came with Germany already on edge after four brutal attacks in the south of the country.

A Syrian asylum seeker blew himself up outside a music festival and wounded 15 other people in Ansbach on Sunday, six days after four passengers on a train and a passer-by were wounded in an axe attack by another asylum seeker in Wuerzburg.

The Islamic State group claimed both attacks.

On Friday, nine people were killed in a shopping centre shooting spree in Munich by a GermanIranian teenager with a history of psychological problems but no apparent links to jihadists.

And a Syrian refugee killed a 45-year-old Polish woman with a large kebab knife Sunday at a snack bar in the southwestern city of Reutlingen.

Police concluded that the incident, in which three others were injured, was likely a “crime of passion”.

Meanwhile, police added that the situation at the hospital in Berlin’s Steglitz district was now “under control” and investigators were on the scene to determine the background to the crime.

“There is currently no danger,” police said on Twitter.

Winfrid Wenzel, a spokesman for Berlin police, said the crime took place in the jaw surgery area of an outpatient clinic where the doctor was in a treatment session with the patient.

Meanwhile, German officials vowed tighter security and called for tougher controls of asylumseekers Tuesday in the aftermath of four attacks in the country in the span of a week, two of which were claimed by the Islamic State extremist group.

“The Islamic State is waging a brutal war of aggression ... against our way of life,” said Joachim Herrmann, the top security official in Bavaria, where three of the attacks took place.

Herrmann said changes need to be made to laws — possibly at the European level — to allow for quicker deportation of people like the Ansbach attacker, while authorities in Germany need to investigate how the man, known as Mohammad Daleel, was able to collect enough material to make at least two bombs in his room in an asylum-seeker home.

“The people of our country cannot be expected to finance the protection of people who violate the law with their tax money,” he said.

Most of the immigrants entering Germany last year came through Bavaria, and Bavarian authorities have been particularly critical of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s opendoor policies. Concerns had died down as the flood of newcomers has slowed dramatically, but the recent attacks have rekindled the debate over how Germany can best cope with the numbers.