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CRIME

Police call off hunt for gunman at Berlin school

A four-hour search for an armed man in a Berlin trade school ended on Tuesday without a sign of the reported gunman.

Published: 20 May 2008 14:24 CEST
Police call off hunt for gunman at Berlin school
Police group outside the school in Berlin. Photo: DPA

“We are assuming there is no suspect in the building,” a Berlin police spokesman told German news agency DPA on Tuesday afternoon.

Police will continue to investigate and plan to question teachers and students at Trade College No. 1, he said. A caller reported a man with a gun at about 9 a.m. on Tuesday at the technical college, a sprawling campus on Wrangelstrasse in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg.

Police remain unsure whether the call was a false alarm, according to DPA.

Teachers and students were evacuated and the streets surrounding the school closed as a helicopter circled overhead and a police team with dogs searched for the reported gunman. More than 100 officers were called to the school.

“We don’t know if the armed person is still in the school or ever was in the school,” Gabi Kobbe, a police spokeswoman, told The Local at midday, as the search was still going on.

The trade college is not known as a problem school, Kobbe said.

The school houses more than 6,000 students and 260 teachers across a sprawling complex of post- and pre-war buildings, including former Prussian barracks. On its web site, the school calls itself the largest trade college in Germany.

with dpa

CRIME

Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

A 17-year-old has turned himself in to police in Germany after an attack on a lawmaker that the country's leaders decried as a threat to democracy.

Published: 5 May 2024 12:52 CEST
Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

The teenager reported to police in the eastern city of Dresden early Sunday morning and said he was “the perpetrator who had knocked down the SPD politician”, police said in a statement.

Matthias Ecke, 41, European parliament lawmaker for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), was set upon by four attackers as he put up EU election posters in Dresden on Friday night, according to police.

Ecke was “seriously injured” and required an operation after the attack, his party said.

Scholz on Saturday condemned the attack as a threat to democracy.

“We must never accept such acts of violence,” he said.

Ecke, who is head of the SPD’s European election list in the Saxony region, was just the latest political target to be attacked in Germany.

Police said a 28-year-old man putting up posters for the Greens had been “punched” and “kicked” earlier in the evening on the same Dresden street.

Last week two Greens deputies were abused while campaigning in Essen in western Germany and another was surrounded by dozens of demonstrators in her car in the east of the country.

According to provisional police figures, 2,790 crimes were committed against politicians in Germany in 2023, up from 1,806 the previous year, but less than the 2,840 recorded in 2021, when legislative elections took place.

A group of activists against the far right has called for demonstrations against the attack on Ecke in Dresden and Berlin on Sunday, Der Spiegel magazine said.

According to the Tagesspiegel newspaper, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is planning to call a special conference with Germany’s regional interior ministers next week to address violence against politicians.

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