A 45-year-old man killed six adults and wounded several others in a shooting attack at a child welfare facility in northern Germany on Monday, in what the local authorities described as a dispute over the custody of the man’s daughter.
The daytime assault in the small city of Stade, roughly 30 miles west of Hamburg, killed six employees of the facility and a neighboring youth center, and it shocked a country where strict gun laws have made mass shootings a rarity.
“This was a murder committed for family reasons — an extremely coldblooded act of violence with no political or economic motives,” Daniela Behrens, the interior minister for the state of Lower Saxony, which includes Stade, told reporters at a press briefing on Monday evening.
The man had an appointment on Monday at a child welfare facility in Stade to visit his 3-month-old daughter and discuss future custody of her, officials said at the briefing. The daughter and her mother, 34, were inside the building.
Responding to reports of shots fired in the facility around noon, police officers found the man fleeing in the passenger seat of a Mercedes, with a 65-year-old woman behind the wheel.
The police fired on the car, though neither the driver nor passenger were injured, officials said. Both were taken into custody.
The young girl and her mother were not injured in the attack, the authorities said. The girl is now in protective custody, and the mother is being questioned by police, according to Katrin Schuol, chief of police of the Lüneburg police department, which encompasses the Stade police department. She and other authorities did not release names of the victims. They also did not identify the people arrested but said the driver had close ties to the alleged shooter’s family.
Ms. Schuol described a gruesome scene at the facility, where five employees died. The sixth died later, in the hospital. Four were women, two were men.
The alleged shooter did not have a license to carry a gun, and it is unclear where the weapon came from, the authorities said. Gun ownership is strictly controlled in Germany.
The police said that the man had been known to the authorities, including state intelligence services, but he had not been flagged as “extremely violent.” He was born in Germany to a family with Turkish background, and lived in the Hanover area, about a two-and-a-half-hour drive away, officials said. The building where the shooting occurred in Stade houses a youth center and the Hanover youth welfare office, where the man’s custody appointment was.
Ms. Schuol said that by Monday evening, all children from the facility had been relocated.
The police cordoned off the site and warned residents to avoid the area, but said that they did not believe that there was any danger to the population at large. The police also established a tip line for anyone with information about the shooting. “Do you have any clues?” the police asked in announcing the tip line. “Then help us!”
The blocks near the scene were relatively quiet late Monday afternoon. Police officers were redirecting the occasional cars to alternative routes. About a dozen camera crews had gathered, but most stood idly by awaiting updates.
Mass shooting events are rare in Germany, partly because of the country’s restrictions on gun ownership. The last major shooting was three years ago, when a gunman killed six people at a Jehovah’s Witness Hall in Hamburg. In neighboring Austria last summer, a 21-year-old man who had failed a test to enter the military opened fire at his former high school, killing 10.
Nearby residents of the Stade shooting said it had rattled their small city.
“Why shouldn’t it be a surprise?” said Ugur Güler, who lives in Stade and was smoking a cigarette on Monday afternoon, a few blocks from the shooting scene. “I mean, a man attacks six people and he shoots.”
Tatiana Firsova contributed reporting from Berlin.
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