An as yet unidentified man entered and opened fire in a cinema located in Viernheim, in the state of Hesse (near Frankfurt, western Germany). The man was killed by the special forces during the police operation.
The first reports spoke of a number of injured between 20 and 50, but as the minutes go by it seems that no one was seriously injured.
The police were alerted around two in the afternoon when the man, masked and armed, entered the Kinoplis cinema and began firing shots into the air. Spectators would have tried to escape, but some of them would have been taken hostage: the area around the cinema was surrounded and flown over by helicopters. The injuries were allegedly caused by tear gas fired by the agents during the operation and not by gunshots. The reasons behind the gesture are still unknown, but the terrorist matrix would seem to be excluded: it would be an isolated gesture by a deranged person.
