One killed and several injured in shooting at Germany’s Heidelberg University
Jan 24, 2022: According to a report by AFP, a gunman stormed a lecture hall at the University of Heidelberg in southwestern Germany on Monday, killing a young woman and wounding three others, and shot himself before fleeing the scene.
A police spokesman told AFP the man fired “wildly” around the amphitheater. German media reported that he apparently had no religious or political motives. All four victims were “severely injured,” police said. Security sources told AFP that one of them later succumbed to his injuries at the hospital.
Police say the man was a “lone criminal” with a “long gun”, confirming that he left the amphitheater before committing suicide.
Police said later that there was no longer any danger, adding that they were “not aware of any letter claiming responsibility” for the attack.
Germany’s Justice Minister Marco Buschmann said his thoughts were with the victims, as he thanked emergency services for their deployment.
Students were told to keep away from the campus in an email from the university as news of the shooting broke, local broadcaster SWR reported.
Though school shootings are relatively rare in Germany, a country with some of the strictest gun laws in Europe, there are a number of similar incidents in the past.
In 2009, a former pupil killed nine students, three teachers and three passers-by in a school shooting at Winnenden, also in Baden-Wuerttemberg. The gunman then killed himself. In 2002, a 19-year-old former student, apparently in revenge for having been expelled, gunned down 16 people including 12 teachers and two students at a school in the central German city of Erfurt. He too then killed himself.
While in 2016, nine people were killed when gunman David Ali Sonboly went on a rampage in a shopping centre in Munich.
Germany has the tighest gun laws in Europe and requires anyone younger than 25 to pass a psychiatric exam before applying for a gun licence.
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