Student gunman kills one, injures three in German uni attack

A gunman shot dead one person and injured at least three others in a lecture hall at one of Germany’s elite universities.

Police at Heidelberg University following a shooting that left two dead and three wounded. Picture: Getty Images.

A gunman shot dead one person and injured at least three others in a lecture hall at one of Germany’s elite universities before taking his own life.

The attacker, an 18-year old biology student at Heidelberg University in the southwest of the country, burst into the medical faculty hall in the middle of a class, shooting a young woman in the head. She died in hospital a few hours later.

The assailant tried to flee but then turned his rifle on himself, police said. The man is believed to have acted alone and to have been carrying a number of firearms in his rucksack.

His name, motive and relationship to the victims were unclear, although DPA, the German press agency, said it had been told there was no evidence of a “political or religious” basis for the attack.

The suspect, a German citizen with no known police record, sent a phone message to his father shortly before the shooting, saying that people would be punished, Siegfried Kollmar, the regional chief of police, said. The suspect had bought two guns abroad, the police chief added.

The shooting took place at about 1pm at the Neuenheimer Feldd campus, where most of the science faculties and parts of the university hospital are located. Police commandos were deployed to the scene.

“A lone perpetrator injured several people in a lecture hall with a rifle,” police said in a tweet. “The attacker himself is dead. Officers are still at the scene with strong forces.”

Mass shootings are relatively rare in Germany, where people can only legally acquire guns if they can provide proof of a legitimate “personal need” to own them, such as a certificate from a shooting club, every five years. There are about 5.4 million firearms and gun parts officially registered to two million owners, although estimates suggest there may be up to 20 million more that have not been declared.

Over the past two years, however, the country has been rattled by two far-right shootings: one in the western town of Hanau, where a right-wing extremist killed nine people from a migrant background, and one in the eastern city of Halle, in which two bystanders were shot dead by a gunman who had tried to force entry to a synagogue.

The last shooting at a school in Germany happened in 2009 when a 17-year-old boy, using a pistol he took from his parents, killed nine pupils aged 14 to 16 at his former high school, the Albertville Realschule in Winnenden, near Stuttgart. He then shot dead three more people in a rampage before killing himself.

In the eastern city of Erfurt in 2002, a 19-year-old man who had previously been expelled from the Gutenberg-Gymnasium high school shot and killed 13 teachers, two students and a police officer. He committed suicide at the scene.

The Times