German Chancellor Olaf Scholz regretted this Friday the “brutal act of violence” that caused deaths and injuries in a religious center of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Hamburg, and stressed that his thoughts are with the victims and their families.
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser also reacted on Twitter, saying she was “shocked by the terrible act of violence perpetrated in a community of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Hamburg” in the north of the country.
The Jehovah’s Witness community also said it was “deeply saddened” by the deadly attack on members after a church service Thursday night at a center in Hamburg.
“The religious community is deeply saddened by the terrible death of its members (…) in Hamburg,” he said in a statement posted on the website.
“Several people lost their lives and others were seriously injured,” he added, although authorities have not released the number of victims.
The police officers indicated that they were alerted to the shooting at 9:15 p.m. this Thursday (8:15 p.m. in Lisbon) and that, after arriving at the scene, they heard a shot on an upper floor of the building.
A police spokesman told reporters that there was “evidence that the perpetrator of the attack” could be in the building, “possibly even among the dead.”
The intervention forces “entered the building very quickly and found dead and seriously injured there,” explained the spokesman, who did not advance possible reasons for the shooting.
According to the Bild newspaper, the shooting generated “a bloodbath” and resulted in at least seven deaths and eight serious injuries.
The German news agency dpa reported that rescue teams pulled 18 people, who escaped unharmed, from a building used by Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Hamburg city authorities said the shooting took place in the Gross Borstel district of northern Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city, at the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses, a modern three-story building.
The mayor of Hamburg, Peter Tschentscher, expressed his solidarity with the victims after the news, which he found shocking, in a message on Twitter.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are part of an international church, founded in the United States in the 19th century and headquartered in Warwick, New York, which has a worldwide membership of about 8.7 million people, with about 170,000 in Germany.
German authorities have been on high alert in recent years in the face of a double threat from terrorism, Islamic extremism and right-wing.
Germany has been the victim of attacks by Islamic extremist movements, in particular one with a truck, claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group that caused 12 deaths in December 2016, in Berlin, the deadliest of its kind committed on German soil.
Germans continue to be a target for Islamic extremist groups, particularly due to the country’s involvement in the coalition against IS in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.
From 2013 to the end of 2021, the number of Muslims considered dangerous in Germany has increased fivefold, reaching 615, the German Interior Ministry said.
Following an alert from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), German authorities announced on January 8 the arrest of two Iranians suspected of preparing a chemical attack using ricin and cyanide.
Another threat is the extreme right, after several deadly attacks in recent years against communities or religious sites in the country.
In the racist attack in Hanau, near Frankfurt (west), in February 2020, a German involved in a conspiracy movement killed nine young people, all of foreign origin.
Between 2000 and 2007, a neo-Nazi group called the NSU had already killed nine immigrants and one police officer. Two of the members committed suicide before being arrested and the third was sentenced to life in prison.
Source: TSF
