A knife-wielding attacker from Afghanistan has captured and lethally injured a 5-year-old boy and wounded his Russian mother in the Bavarian municipality of Arnschwang.

The carnage unfolded in the migrant shelter on Saturday afternoon, police report.

Police, who had promptly arrived at the scene, shot dead the assailant, who was identified in a police report as a 41-year-old Afghan national, a resident of the same shelter as his victims.

The police were alerted to the incident via an emergency call at about 16:50 local time. The caller said that the man had got hold of a boy and was attacking him with a knife. Before being neutralized, the perpetrator also injured the boy’s mother, a 47-year-old Russian national, who was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Her other child, a six-year old boy, who was present at the scene at the time of the brutal attack, was deeply shaken but physically unharmed, police said. He was also brought to the hospital. A crisis intervention unit is attending to both child and mother at the hospital.

So far, it is not clear what prompted the attack, and police have launched an investigation.

“The investigation is at the very beginning,” Bavarian state police said in a statement.

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