A gunman opened fire on a congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Hamburg killing eight people, including a pregnant woman, and wounding eight others before turning his weapon on himself as police stormed the building in what the authorities on Friday called “the worst such mass shooting incident of this dimension” to affect the city.

The authorities in Hamburg, in northern Germany, said that the gunman had fled to an upper floor as the police arrived on Thursday night before turning his gun on himself. Four men and two women were killed in the attack. One of the women was pregnant, and her 7-month-old foetus did not survive, the authorities said.

“It is a horrific act — and it is a horrifying act,” Andy Grote, senator of the interior for the city-state of Hamburg, said. Mass shootings are extremely rare in Germany, which has relatively strict gun control laws, and Grote described the attack as “the worst crime in the recent history of our city”.

Police officers responding to the first emergency calls entered the building as they heard shots ringing out from inside, the authorities said at a news conference on Friday. They saw injured people on the ground and saw a man with a gun run to the upper floor of the building.

They then moved to isolate the gunman, an approach that prevented others among the roughly 50 people gathered in the building from being killed, said Matthias Tresp, the chief of police in Hamburg.

In keeping with German privacy laws, the police identified the gunman only as Philip F., a 35-year-old German who, according to the authorities, had acted on his own out of a “special rage” against religious groups. There was no indication that he had been motivated by terrorism, and he had not previously been known to the police, said Ralf Peter Anders, a prosecutor. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, a denomination founded in the US in the 19th century, has been active in Germany since 1902. They make up a relatively small religious community of about 175,000 adherents in Germany, which is home to nearly 900 dedicated “kingdom halls”, as the group calls its places of worship.

The first calls about the shooting were made to the police at 9:15pm (local time). Residents in the area, a normally quiet neighbourhood in northern Hamburg, said that they had been stunned to hear shots ringing out from the building where the religious community met. “I started filming with my phone, and through the zoom, I could determine that someone was shooting,” Gregor Miebach, a student who lives across from the hall, told the German television channel N-TV. “There were at least 25shots that I heard.”’

New York Times News Service