A German teenager shot two people dead and injured seven, three of them seriously, when he opened fire from his bedroom window in the Bavarian town of Bad Reichenhall yesterday afternoon.
When police stormed the apartment yesterday evening, they found two more bodies, believed to be those of the 16-year-old gunman and his 18-year-old sister.
The bloodbath began shortly after noon in the Alpine town, close to the Austrian border, when the teenager started shooting indiscriminately at passers-by on the street outside his home.
A man and a woman were shot dead within minutes and seven others, many of them patients from a nearby hospital, were wounded. The gunman continued shooting for almost 45 minutes and did not stop even when an ambulance arrived to treat the wounded.
Police eventually removed the injured with the help of an armour-plated limousine lent by the Bavarian Prime Minister, Mr Edmund Stoiber. Mr Stoiber was visiting a nearby town when he heard of the shootings and immediately ordered that his car be used to shield police as they removed the wounded from the scene.
The teenager, who has not been named, was an introverted loner who suffered teasing at school, according to some classmates, and had recently started pasting Nazi images into his schoolbooks.
"He was someone who always had the mickey taken out of him," said one.
Another classmate said that the boy frequently boasted about his father's collection of weapons, and police confirmed last night that his father was a shooting enthusiast who owned a number of guns.
The first police officers were on the scene within 20 minutes of the start of the shooting and were soon joined by specially trained commandos and psychologists. The boy's parents co-operated with the police and advised on the best approach to take in persuading him to leave the house and surrender.
But, as a crowd of local people, reporters and camera crews gathered at the scene, no sound emerged from the house and, after four hours, police admitted that they had made no contact with the gunman. When 150 police officers stormed the building shortly after 5.30 p.m. they found the teenager and his sister.
Detectives insisted last night that they were unable to say for certain how events had unfolded - or even if the boy was responsible for the shootings - until autopsies are carried out today. Few local people were prepared to speak to reporters yesterday, which was a public holiday in Bavaria. But rumours about a possible motive were rife, including the suggestion that an alcohol problem within the family had destabilised the teenager in recent months.
