Emergency call handlers have told of the harrowing moment Jehovah’s Witnesses begged them for help before falling silent during a mass shooting at a Kingdom Hall.
Lone gunman Philipp Fusz began shooting people at random inside the Kingdom Hall in the Alsterdorf quarter of the German city of Hamburg at 9.04pm on 9th March.
A Kingdom Hall is a place of worship used by Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Just four minutes later, first responders arrived on the scene. By that point, 47 calls had been made to the police and the fire department.
Emergency call handlers have now recounted the harrowing moment people trapped inside the building during the rampage pleaded for help and were shot on the line.
Emergency call handler Stefan S., 37, told local media: “One emergency call was more dramatic than the other.
“Within seconds, all inquiry points were busy with emergency calls. They were all coming from Deelboege [Street].”
Recalling a colleague’s panicked look, he said: “He just stuttered, ‘Shots, lots of shots, someone is shooting.'”
Stefan told how shots were heard on the line and victims pleaded for help before suddenly falling silent.
On phoning back a caller after the line went dead, he said: “No one answered anymore. We sent out all the ambulances we had.”
When first responders arrived on the scene, seven were dead and eight were badly injured, four critically.
Among the gunman’s victims were a pregnant mother and her unborn child.
The adult victims were four men and two women aged 33 to 60.
One Ukrainian and one Ugandan are among the injured. All the deceased and the remainder of the injured are German.
The onslaught ended when Fusz, 35, turned his legally-owned Heckler & Koch P30 semi-automatic handgun on himself inside the Kingdom Hall.
Some 20 people survived the attack physically unscathed.
Interior Senator Andy Grote described the event as the “worst crime in recent history in Hamburg”.
Fusz was a management consultant and a former Jehovah’s Witness.
Police chief Ralf Martin Meyer said he harboured “a particular anger against religious followers, especially against Jehovah’s Witnesses and against his former employer”.
Some have claimed that a 306-page book he self-published in December led to his expulsion from the church.
In the book, titled ‘The Truth About God, Jesus Christ and Satan: A New Reflected View of Epochal Dimensions’, Fusz interprets the Russian invasion of Ukraine as God’s cleansing of Ukrainian sex workers.
