A victim’s body lay covered on Wednesday as the police recorded the scene at a secondary school in Winnenden, Germany. More Photos >
WINNENDEN, Germany — A teenage gunman killed 15 people, most of them female, on Wednesday in a rampage that began at a school near Stuttgart in southern Germany and ended in a nearby town, where he then killed himself after the police wounded him.
Students at the Albertville school in Winnenden, Germany, where a teenager began a shooting rampage on Wednesday, killing 15 people and then himself. Page A14. In Alabama, details emerged about a gunman who killed 10 and himself on Tuesday. Page A15. More Photos »
The attack left Germany, which tightened tough gun controls after a similar attack at a school seven years ago, struggling to understand the carnage that had again befallen it, a country with relatively little violent crime. In 2002, a gunman killed 16 people before killing himself at a school in Erfurt, in eastern Germany.
“This is a day of mourning for all of Germany,” Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a brief statement in Berlin. “Our thoughts are with the friends and families.”
The authorities identified the attacker as Tim Kretschmer, 17, who graduated last year from the school he later attacked, the Albertville secondary school in Winnenden, a prosperous commuter town near Stuttgart, in the state of Baden-Württemberg.
State officials and the police, in news briefings throughout the day, described three hours of horror that began soon after the school day started.
They said the attacker, clad in black, opened fire in three classrooms at the school, killing nine students — eight girls and a boy — and three teachers, all women. Seven wounded students were hospitalized.
The officials said that several police officers arrived at the school two minutes after receiving an emergency call at 9:33 a.m. and that they could hear shots still being fired. The officers entered the school and caught a glimpse of the gunman, who fired one shot at them and ran. That is when he apparently encountered and killed two of the teachers, the officials said.
Mr. Kretschmer managed to leave the school and flee the grounds, shooting and killing an employee of a nearby psychiatric clinic, officials said.
Firefighters, paramedics and columns of heavily armed commandos swarmed the school and sealed off Winnenden’s small downtown area, where the attacker had been seen heading. Helicopters circled over the town of some 27,000 residents.
But the attacker slipped away, hijacking a car and forcing the driver to take him to Wendlingen, about 25 miles southeast of Stuttgart.
Inside a Volkswagen dealership there, the gunman killed an employee and a customer before police officers engaged him in a gunfight. The gunman was shot in the leg and two police officers were wounded. As the police closed in, Mr. Kretschmer shot himself in the head.
No motive had emerged by Wednesday night. “There were apparently no signs that he would be capable of something like this,” said Erwin Hetger, the state police chief.
People who knew Mr. Kretschmer described him as quiet or inconspicuous.
Adrian Homoke, 19, said the gunman seemed to be a normal enough student during his last year at Albertville, with friends and his own interests. “He liked to play poker during the breaks,” Mr. Homoke said. “I couldn’t say anything bad about him.”
Mr. Kretschmer’s father is a member of a local shooting club and owned 15 legally registered weapons, according to state officials. One of them, a pistol usually kept in a bedroom, was missing when the police searched the family home just after the shooting at the school, as were more than 100 rounds of ammunition, the police said.
Many in Germany wondered whether the attack could have had any link — in the mind of the attacker, at least — to the shooting rampage in Alabama on Tuesday that left 11 dead, including the gunman.
By nightfall, the scene around the school and in Winnenden was part media circus, part impromptu memorial.
A long concrete wall was adorned with candles, flowers and messages to the dead and their families. A Roman Catholic church held a service in the center of town that was packed with mourners, many sobbing.
Albert Biesinger, a Catholic deacon who works with the local police to counsel traumatized crime victims, said the authorities had quickly steered the surviving students and their families away from the grisly scene at the school.
“I tell them, ‘This is too much for you,’ ” the deacon said. “They couldn’t handle that right now.”
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