Several wounded in shooting at Germany’s Heidelberg University | News

Local media reports that the perpetrator was allegedly a student with no known political motives and is now dead.

A gunman has injured several people in a shooting inside a lecture hall at Heidelberg University in southwestern Germany, police said, adding that the perpetrator was now dead.

“A lone perpetrator injured several people in a lecture hall with a long gun. The perpetrator is dead,” Mannheim police said in a statement on Monday.

A major police operation was under way at the university’s Neuenheimer Feld campus, they added on Twitter, urging people to steer clear of the area “so that rescue workers and emergency services can travel freely”.

Bild newspaper reported that the shooter, a student, opened fire in the lecture hall, injuring several people before turning his weapon on himself. Investigators said that he had no political or religious motives, Bild added.

Heidelberg is located south of Frankfurt and has about 160,000 inhabitants. Its university is one of Germany’s best-known. Founded in 1386, Heidelberg is Germany’s oldest university.

The university’s Neuenheimer Feld campus hosts natural sciences departments, part of the university clinic as well as a botanical garden.

Earlier, police said a large deployment of police and emergency services was on the scene.

Germany has been hit in recent years by a spate of attacks. School shootings however are relatively rare in Germany, a country with some of the strictest gun laws in Europe.

In 2009, a former pupil killed nine students, three teachers and three passers-by in a school shooting at Winnenden, also in Baden-Wuerttemberg. The gunman then killed himself.

Meanwhile, in November 2006, a former student at a vocational school in Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany went on a shooting spree, injuring 37 people before killing himself.

In 2002, A 19-year-old former student, apparently in revenge for having been expelled, gunned down 16 people including 12 teachers and two students at a school in the central German city of Erfurt. He, too, then killed himself.