STADE, Germany — A gunman opened fire inside a youth welfare center in this medieval town on the lower Elbe on Monday, killing six people and wounding several others in one of the deadliest attacks Germany has seen this year. Police arrested the man they identified as the main suspect and said they were questioning two other people in connection with the violence.
Five of the victims died at the scene on Dankersstrasse, a residential street just south of the old town, and a sixth died later in a hospital, police said. All six were adults. Four of the dead were women, ABC News reported, citing the German news agency dpa, and a police official said the victims were employees of the facility rather than the young people it houses, according to CNN.
In a brief statement, the force said it had “arrested the main perpetrator, while two others are currently under investigation.” The roles of the two other people taken into custody were not immediately clear. Officers said they were still working to establish exactly what had happened and why, and asked the public not to draw conclusions while that work continued.
The center provides temporary accommodation for pregnant women and for young mothers living with their children. It sits in a quiet quarter close to a municipal daycare and a primary school, a proximity that turned the early hours of the response tense before police confirmed there was no wider danger.
A large operation moved through central Stade through the afternoon, and residents were told to stay away from the area and follow instructions from emergency services. Police later said the scene had been secured and that there was no ongoing threat to the general public. They did not give a precise figure for the number of people wounded, though dpa reported that some of the injuries were serious.
The suspect is a 45-year-old German man, a police official said in remarks reported by Reuters. Investigators have not released his name, in keeping with German privacy rules, and have not described any prior contact with the people who were killed.
The motive remained unclear on Monday evening. Der Spiegel, citing the police, reported that the killings appeared to stem from a personal dispute and that investigators were not currently treating political or extremist motives as a line of inquiry. Police cautioned that the picture could change as the investigation developed.
President Frank-Walter Steinmeier sent his condolences to the families of those killed and thanked the police officers, paramedics and other emergency workers who responded. Local officials echoed that message while expressing relief that the violence had not spread to the children nearby.
Carsten Brokelmann, a local councillor, said the city runs a daycare center and an elementary school close to where the shooting happened, and that the staff and children there were unharmed. He thanked the officers who managed what he described as a chaotic scene and offered his sympathies to the victims’ families.
Stade police also warned that unverified accounts of the attack were circulating online, and urged people not to spread rumors that could complicate the inquiry. The force said it would release further details as they were confirmed.
Stade is a Hanseatic town of about 50,000 people on the Elbe, roughly 45 kilometers (27 miles) west of Hamburg in the state of Lower Saxony. Germany’s firearms laws are among the strictest in Europe, and shootings with multiple victims are rare, though the country has experienced occasional attacks at schools and other public sites over the years.
The investigation was continuing late Monday, with police saying they expected to provide an update on the circumstances of the killings and the identities of those in custody once the facts had been established.
