A gunman killed nine people in two shootings at shisha bars and one at his home in the German town of Hanau on Wednesday night, police said.
The suspect then killed himself after also killing his mother at his home, police said.
Nine people died in the attacks on the two bars at about 10pm on Wednesday night, while five others shot have life-threatening injuries, police said.
Photo: AFP
Some of those killed were of Turkish origin, Turkish presidency spokesman Ibrahim Kaln said.
“We expect German authorities to show maximum effort to enlighten this case. Racism is a collective cancer,” Kaln said on Twitter.
The killer was named by police as 43-year-old Tobias R. His surname was not given, in line with German practice.
He shot himself and his 72-year-old mother at home, police said. They also confirmed that he possessed a hunting license.
The Bild newspaper said he expressed extreme right-wing views in a letter of confession that he left behind.
After the murders, a huge hunt was launched for the perpetrator involving dozens of armed police and a helicopter hovering above the commuter town 25km east of Frankfurt.
Police tweeted at about 5am that special police force officers had stormed the home of the alleged suspect and found him dead along with another body.
“There are currently no indications of other perpetrators,” police said in a statement.
Police sealed off and searched the home in Hanau’s Kesselstadt District, near the scene of one of the shootings, after following up witness statements on a getaway vehicle.
Local media reported that eight or nine shots were fired at the Midnight shisha bar on Heumarkt in the center of the town at about 10pm.
A dark vehicle was seen leaving the scene. Soon afterward, shots were fired at a second shisha bar — the Arena Bar and Cafe in Kurt-Schumacher-Platz in Kesselstadt District.
Federal prosecutors yesterday said that they were taking charge of investigating the shooting amid reports that the suspect might have had a far-right motive.
Witnesses to the Hanau attack described how the attacker had randomly fired shots into the bars.
One man in his early 30s said he received a call from a friend who had been in one of the bars.
“He left a message to tell me he had been hit,” the man, who was not identified, told NTV. “I called him back immediately. He told me he was in an ambulance. He had a bullet in his shoulder.”
“These are people we have known for years,” the son of the Arena Bar manager said of two employees gunned down. “That there are people out there who are so heartless, shooting others who have done nothing wrong... It is a shock for everyone.”
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS