BERLIN — A masked man was shot dead Thursday after entering a movie theater in southwestern Germany with a firearm and taking several captives, authorities said. No one else was hurt.
The armed man, whose identity was not released and whose motives were unclear, entered the Kinopolis movie theater in the city of Viernheim in the early afternoon and was said to fire a gun.
The man held several people, police spokesman Christiane Kobus said, but she didn’t have a precise number.
Officers “successively entered the cinema and were able to locate the man and the people he was holding,” Kobus said. “There was a threat situation, and the man was then shot dead by a colleague.”
Police said the deployment lasted about three hours. There were no other injuries, Kobus said.
She said she had no information on the assailant’s identity or motives.
Another police spokesman, Bernd Hochstaedter, said “there are no indications at present of an Islamist background.”
Hesse state’s interior minister, Peter Beuth, said it wasn’t clear whether the weapon was functional, and police said they were still checking that. Beuth told the regional legislature in Wiesbaden that the man was masked and that apparently, four shots were fired.
Beuth said the man had given a confused impression, the dpa news agency reported.
Cinema employee Guri Blakaj, who was working at the time, said he saw an armed man at the popcorn counter and at first thought he was a customer who had come in a costume — “but then we quickly realized it was something more serious, and we lay down on the ground.”
Blakaj told the n-tv news channel that the man told him to close the doors while holding the weapon to his head, then ordered him to go to his office and stay there. He said the man shot at a colleague but didn’t hit him.
“He seemed very confused, and was relatively young,” Blakaj said. He said he had asked the assailant whether he wanted money, and the man said he didn’t. Blakaj and colleagues stayed in an office until police arrived.
Nina Reininger, a prosecutor in nearby Darmstadt, said her office was investigating but she has no information so far on the attacker’s identity.
Prosecutors would not comment on a report in the Bild daily, which identified no sources, which said investigators found an explosive belt and a hand grenade next to the assailant’s body, and that explosives experts were examining the objects.
The Kinopolis, a multiplex theater, is located in a shopping mall in Viernheim, which is near the city of Mannheim. The incident happened on a hot summer afternoon and the cinema appears to have been relatively empty at the time.