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Investigation group "Botanik" should clarify the motive for the killing spree

2022-01-25T12:15:20.699Z


Investigation group "Botanik" should clarify the motive for the killing spree Created: 2022-01-25Updated: 2022-01-25 13:10 Police officers are standing on the grounds of Heidelberg University's botanical garden. © Uwe Anspach/dpa After the killing spree at the University of Heidelberg, there are still many unanswered questions. A team of investigators should quickly find out what drove the assa


Investigation group "Botanik" should clarify the motive for the killing spree

Created: 2022-01-25Updated: 2022-01-25 13:10

Police officers are standing on the grounds of Heidelberg University's botanical garden.

© Uwe Anspach/dpa

After the killing spree at the University of Heidelberg, there are still many unanswered questions.

A team of investigators should quickly find out what drove the assassin and how he got his hands on the guns.

Heidelberg - The police want to clarify the background of the killing spree at Heidelberg University with an investigative team.

An investigative unit called "Botanik" was founded with 32 people, announced the Baden-Württemberg Interior Minister Thomas Strobl (CDU) on Tuesday in Stuttgart.

He is certain that it will be possible to bring light into the darkness quickly.

The name is due to the fact that the affected university building borders on the botanical garden.

After the killing spree with two dead and three injured, the investigators are concentrating primarily on the motive of the assassin and the origin of his weapons.

A police spokesman said that the relatives of the young man who shot students several times in a lecture hall on Monday were also spoken to.

The alleged perpetrator had sent a Whatsapp message to his father shortly before the crime.

According to the police, the German student wrote "that people now have to be punished".

"The victim's parents are in great pain, but so are those of the perpetrator," said the police spokesman.

The Mannheim police chief Siegfried Kollmar announced on Monday: "We will now examine his surroundings in the next few days, with high pressure." The motive was still unclear on Tuesday morning.

In general, a person can become a rampage "because they experience the existing or subjectively perceived insults from childhood through adolescence to young adulthood as particularly bad," police psychologist Adolf Gallwitz told the radio station "SWR Aktuell".

The question of how the biology student got hold of the two weapons, one of which he used for the killing spree, is still unanswered.

All that is known is that the 18-year-old is said to have bought the rifles abroad a few days ago.

The 18-year-old, who lived in Mannheim, chose a shotgun for the attack.

According to the police psychologist Gallwitz, gunmen have a common thought pattern in deadly attacks like the one in Heidelberg.

"He was looking for a grandiose way of going down," he said.

"A suicide was ultimately just too banal for him." The perpetrators are not loners and "not always just people who are seriously mentally ill".

According to current knowledge, the investigators assume that the German only fired several times in the lecture hall of the Center for Basic Biological Research, where around 30 students were, and later killed himself in front of the building.

A 19- and 20-year-old woman and a 20-year-old man were slightly injured by the shots.

A 23-year-old student died on Monday afternoon as a result of a shot in the head.

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The German Police Union recommends those directly affected by the crime to seek psychological care.

"The students in the lecture hall were scared to death, they didn't know how long the perpetrator would keep shooting," said country chief Ralf Kusterer of the German Press Agency on Tuesday.

He added: "They will not forget that for the rest of their lives." The experience could lead to post-traumatic stress disorders if those affected were not treated.

dpa

Source: merkur

All news articles on 2022-01-25

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