Police arrest suspect after incident in Rot am See

This article is more than 7 months old

This article is more than 7 months old

Six people have been killed and several injured in a shooting in the south-western German town of Rot am See, police have said.

A suspect has been arrested and no further suspects are believed to be at large, police from the nearby town of Aalen said.

“According to my information, there were six dead and several injured,” police spokesman Rudolf Biehlmaier told German broadcaster n-tv. “We are working on the assumption that this was a single attacker,” he said.

Biehlmaier said the initial information suggested the suspect, a German citizen, and one or more of the victims knew each other. Some of the victims belonged to the same family, he added.

Rot am See is located 84 miles south-east of Frankfurt, close to the medieval town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

After the shooting at around 12.45pm (1145 GMT), first responders arrived on the scene to find the dead and wounded in and around a local hotel.

Police said they responded to the shooting “in force”, and images from the scene showed large numbers of emergency vehicles and heavily armed officers sealing off the area with red and white police tape.

Meanwhile forensics teams dressed in white coveralls moved in to secure evidence.

The shooting took place near the train station at Rot am See, a town of 5,200 residents near Stuttgart, capital of Baden-Wuerttemberg state.

While owning firearms is not illegal in Germany, most guns can be acquired only with a licence and they are closely monitored, making mass shootings comparatively rare.

In October last year, a far-right attacker shot two people dead in the eastern city Halle, wounding several more after failing to break into a packed synagogue armed with home-made weapons.

In July 2016, a teenager used a pistol bought illegally online to kill nine people in a Munich shopping centre, before turning the weapon on himself.