A person wielding an ax on a road crowded with soccer followers was shot by the police on Sunday in Hamburg, Germany, solely hours earlier than the town was to host a sport on the European soccer championships.
The man threatened cops with “a pickax and an incendiary gadget,” a police spokesman mentioned on Sunday. The police shot the person, who was injured and was being handled, they confirmed.
The incident happened in Hamburg’s leisure district, a bit of the town often called the Reeperbahn that’s full of eating places and bars, and in an space filled with 1000’s of Dutch followers who had arrived to see the Netherlands play Poland on Sunday afternoon.
According to a spokeswoman for the Hamburg police, the person got here out of a small restaurant with a double-bladed ax and a firebomb and threatened officers close by.
The police initially deployed pepper spray and fired a warning shot into the air earlier than taking pictures the attacker, in accordance with Henning Hünerbein, a German journalist who was filming exterior the restaurant.
The police mentioned that the person had been injured, however they may not give any additional updates on his situation. He was positioned in an ambulance after the taking pictures and pushed away. No followers or cops had been injured.
The web site of the taking pictures was a 10-minute stroll from the town’s official fan zone, which was thronged with many extra 1000’s of followers on the time. It got here on the third day of the monthlong event, which brings collectively the continent’s greatest 24 groups each 4 years.
The match between Poland and the Netherlands on the metropolis’s Volksparkstadion, which has a capability of about 57,000, was certainly one of three video games set to be performed on Sunday.
The is a growing story and will probably be up to date.