Some 40 German police officers were waiting for Sebastien Nussbaumer at Hamburg-Harburg station in the early hours of Monday morning, news website Blick reports. The station is located near his girlfriend’s home. 

Armed with machine guns, the police were able to arrest Nussbaumer without incident after his train pulled in at 3.10am. Prior to the train’s arrival, police had evacuated the station and cordoned off the area. The Swiss suspect was carrying a loaded pistol, newspaper Tages Anzeiger reported.

With a cluster of tattoos on his neck and forearms, Nussbaumer was easy to spot. Among the tattoos is a symbol on his forearm representing Hitler’s paramilitary force, the Stormtroopers. The use of this symbol is illegal in Germany.

Sebastien Nussbaumer is already well known to the police. In 2006 he attacked a group of Albanians with a knuckle-duster, an event that was filmed by a neo-Nazi colleague. In 2007 he broke the noses of two men, one with a kick, the other with a headbutt, and also beat a drunken man so badly that he suffered concussion.

Nussbaumer spent 16 months in jail for these crimes.

In January, he was again sentenced to 39 months for a variety of less serious crimes. Nussbaumer appealed the sentence, arguing that he had been judged more harshly than others because of his neo-Nazi beliefs.

He then went missing but reappeared on the Swiss police radar when he seriously injured a man in a shooting incident in Zurich’s old town on Saturday night.

The cause of the dispute that led to the shooting is as yet unknown.

In addition to his girlfriend, Nussbaumer also has other neo-Nazi friends living in the Hamburg area, Blick reports.