Six people have been killed after a gunman opened fire at a shelter for mothers and children in a northern German town.
Emergency services raced to the centre in Stade at around 12:15pm on Monday afternoon after reports of shots being fired in the town, located around 50km west of Hamburg. Five adults died at the scene, while a sixth died in hospital later.
Police said three people were detained, including the suspected shooter, and that all the fatalities were adults. Footage released by Bild newspaper showed police surrounding and detaining two people from a car that was driving down a road with a flat tyre.
The force later said the suspect is a 45-year-old German man of Turkish descent, and that the shooting erupted over a “custody dispute” between the man and the mother of his three-month-old daughter, who lived at the facility.
It is understood that the mother and the child were not among the six killed in the attack.
Local media reported four women and one man had died, but no formal details of their identities have been released.
They were staff members at the youth centre, Kathrin Schuol, chief constable of the Lüneburg Police Headquarters, said at a press conference after the incident.
Officers called the incident a homicide with multiple victims. In a press conference on Monday evening, Lower Saxony's interior minister Daniela Behrens described the shooting as an “extremely cold-blooded act of violence” but said it is not believed to be politically motivated or an extremist act, according to the Hamburger Morgenpost.
Police warned people to stay away from the area where the incident took place, but later said there was no danger to the general public.
Footage posted by Bild showed a car with a flat right tyre slowing to a halt in a tree-lined road. Police with guns then ran towards the car and detained two people who were made to lie flat on the ground.
Police cordoned off the area near the facility in a cobbled street with red brick homes, and forensic experts in white suits and plainclothes police were at the scene.
German chancellor Friedrich Merz called the incident "shocking to the core."
"Many people, who wanted to help and protect others, lost their lives or were injured," Mr Merz wrote on his X account, sending his condolences to the victims' families.
Mass shootings are rare in Germany.
In 2023, a gunman in Hamburg shot dead six people before killing himself at a Jehovah's Witness worship hall. In 2016, an 18-year-old German-Iranian man who was obsessed with mass killings killed at least nine people in Munich.
