Germany shooting: man killed after opening fire at cinema in Viernheim

An armed and masked man has been shot dead by German special police officers after storming a cinema complex in Viernheim, in the Hesse region.

The gunman had taken several hostages, all of whom escaped uninjured. A number of people inside the cinema were lightly injured when police deployed CS gas, reports said.

Police said they had no indication of the motives of the man who entered the Kinopolis complex at about 3pm local time, shortly after the start of the first screenings of the day.

The cinema had been showing The Jungle Book, Alice in Wonderland and the comedy Central Intelligence. According to several reports in German media, the man was wearing a balaclava and carrying combat boots and a “long weapon”, with a munition belt slung over his shoulder.

Witnesses said the man fired four shots as he entered the cinema.

The interior minister of the state of Hesse, Peter Beuth, said special police forces had “fought and killed” the gunman. The tabloid newspaper Bild reported that police had found a hand grenade and an explosives belt next to the man’s body but could not confirm whether they were fake or real.

One of the hostages, identified by Bild as 16-year-old Almir Almilovic, was quoted as saying: “The perpetrator surprised us on the toilet. He hissed to us: ‘Lie down if you care for your lives!’ We were around 17 hostages.”

German police’s special response unit closed off an area around the cinema complex shortly after the incident began. The police spokesperson Bernd Hochstädter said the deployment lasted around three hours.

Initially, there were media reports that up to 50 people had been injured.

According to the press agency DPA, police believed the gunman was a “confused individual” rather than a terrorist.

Hochstädter told the Die Welt newspaper: “We have no indications regarding the motive, but we can say with certainty that the attack did not have an Islamist motive.”

Germany has one of the highest weapons-per-head rates in the world, but one of the lowest gun homicide rates in Europe: 0.05 per 1,000 people, compared with 3.34 in the US.

Incidents of gun crime, including the use of weapons to threaten people, have declined by almost a quarter since 2010, a trend that many experts put down to gun law changes after a string of high-profile shootings, including the killing of 15 people at a school in Winnenden near Stuttgart in March 2009.

Germany is the only country in the world where anyone under the age of 25 who applies for their first firearms licence must undergo a psychiatric evaluation with a trained counsellor, including personality and anger management tests.