A gunman who killed seven people including an unborn baby at Jehovah's Witness church in Hamburg has been named.
Philipp F, a 35-year-old business centre employee, is believed to be responsible for the mass shooting that took place Thursday evening, according to German Nespaper BILD. Seven people were killed in the attack, including an unborn child, and eight others wounded, four of them seriously.
His motive is still unknown, with Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a former Hamburg mayor, describing the attack as as “a brutal act of violence.”
Last night, police said they believed the shooting was carried out by a lone gunman and this could be a person who was found dead in the building. According to the German magazine Spiegel, the suspect was a former member of the congregation, who were gathered for a Bible study meeting at the centre.
Citing his website, Spiegel said Phillip F. grew up in Kempten in the Allgäu region in a strict, religious family. After leaving high school, he trained as a bank clerk and went on to study business administration.
He lived abroad on a number of occasions before settling in Hamburg, describing himself as "multicultural" and "a self-confessed European".
On his website, he offered consulting services in areas ranging from "controlling" to "theology", with customers charged a "minimum daily rate of 250,000 euros plus 19 per cent VAT". He justified his high prices by saying his work generates "at least 2.5 million euros" for clients.
Under the heading "my core values" he writes: "Integrity, trust and top performance are the values I stand for, which I support and apply. According to Speigel's information, he had a gun permit.
A spokesperson for Hamburg police said they could not provide any information regarding the suspect's identity, referring reporters to the press conference planned for 11am. Soon after the attack began, residents in the Alsterdorf district were sent phone alerts of a "life-threatening situation", according to the DPA news agency.
This morning, undertakers arrived at the church - located in the Gross Borstel district just a few miles from downtown Hamburg - to remove the bodies of those killed in the massacre. Amid heavy snowfall, dozens of police officers cordoned off the church and forensic officers used large beige sacks to carefully remove vital evidence from the scene.
Staff at the Jet petrol station next door spoke of their shock over the attack. One said: “I’ve never seen so many police. They were here all night. The local community has been left devastated by this.”
Ramon-Walter Essenwanger Martinez, 41, is a self-employed audio engineer in Hamburg. He found out about the shooting online just 20 minutes after it happened.
Speaking to Mirror Online, he said: “I was looking at a social media group last night for Hamburg, where I get all my updates, and I learned that all these people had been shot – I found out just 20 minutes after it happened.”
“It was a terrible shock. I am from Lima in Peru and came to Germany in 2016, and there you do have violence, but it is not normally really connected to churches and religion.”
Speaking to German news agency DPA, student Laura Bauch, who lives nearby, said there were around four periods of shooting.
“There were always several shots in these periods, roughly at intervals of 20 seconds to a minute,” she said.
Bauch said she looked out her window and saw a person running from the ground floor to the second floor of the Jehovah’s Witnesses hall.
Gregor Miesbach, who can see the church from his home, was alerted by the sound of shots and filmed a figure entering the building through a window.
In the footage, shots can then be heard from inside before a figure emerges from the hall. They are seen in the courtyard before firing more shots through a first-floor window, at which point the lights inside the room go out.
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