WÜRZBURG: A man armed carrying a long knife has killed three people and injured five others in Germany’s southern city.
A 24-year-old suspect was a Somali man living in Wuerzburg who was shot in the thigh before being arrested. His life was not in danger from his gunshot wound, as per the police.
Police said he had been violent and mentally unstable and had recently received psychiatric treatment Bavaria’s top security official Joachim Herrmann said the injured include a young boy, whose father was probably among the dead.
Viral videos posted on social media showed pedestrians surrounding the attacker and trying to hold him at bay with chairs and sticks.
A woman who said she had witnessed the incident said, “He had a really big knife with him and was attacking people,” Julia Runze said. “And then many people tried to throw chairs or umbrellas or cellphones at him and stop him.”
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“The police then approached him and I think a shot was fired, you could hear that clearly.” Police spokeswoman Kerstin Kunick said officers were alerted around 5 p.m. (1500 GMT) to a knife attack on Barbarossa Square in the center of the city. Würzburg is a city of about 130,000 people located between Munich and Frankfurt.
Bavaria’s governor Markus Soeder expressed shock at the news of the attack. “We grieve with the victims and their families,” he wrote in a post on social media.
