BERLIN (Reuters) – The attack at a Jehovah’s Witnesses worship hall in Hamburg, in which a gunman shot dead seven people including an unborn child before killing himself, is Germany’s latest shooting in recent years, placing already strict gun laws under further scrutiny.
An overview of major shootings in recent years:
– In February 2020, a 43-year-old man killed nine people with a migration background in a right-wing extremist and racially-motivated attack in the city of Hanau, east of Frankfurt, before shooting his mother and himself.
– In October 2019, a gunman who denounced Jews opened fire outside a German synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, and killed two people as he livestreamed the attack.
– In July 2016, an 18-year-old German-Iranian man killed nine people, most of them Muslims, in a right-wing motivated rampage at a shopping centre in the southern city of Munich.
– In March 2011, two U.S. soldiers were killed in an Islamist-motivated attack on a U.S. Army bus at Frankfurt airport.
– In March 2009, a 17-year-old shot dead 15 people in Winnenden and Wendlingen in south-west Germany in a school and went on the run before killing himself.
– In April 2002, 17 people died in the city of Erfurt when a 19-year-old shot 16 people and then himself at a school.
(Reporting by Andreas Rinke, Writing by Rachel More,; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)
