Patient shoots doctor at Berlin hospital, kills self

Berlin (AFP) – A patient shot a doctor before committing suicide at a Berlin hospital on Tuesday, police said, adding there was no sign the incident was a terrorist attack. 

A police spokeswoman told AFP that several shots were fired at a university hospital in the well-heeled southwestern Steglitz neighbourhood of the German capital.

“According to preliminary information, a patient at the hospital shot a doctor and then killed himself,” she said.

“The doctor is in intensive care,” the spokeswoman said, adding there was “no indication this was a terror attack”.

The shooting came with Germany already on edge after four brutal attacks in the south of the country. 

A Syrian asylum seeker blew himself up outside a music festival and wounded 15 other people in Ansbach on Sunday, six days after four passengers on a train and a passer-by were wounded in an axe attack by another asylum seeker in Wuerzburg on July 18.

The Islamic State group claimed both attacks.

On Friday, nine people were killed in a shopping centre shooting spree in Munich by a German-Iranian teenager with a history of psychological problems but no apparent links to jihadists.

And a Syrian refugee killed a 45-year-old Polish woman with a large kebab knife Sunday at a snack bar in the southwestern city of Reutlingen.

Police concluded that the incident, in which three others were injured, was likely a “crime of passion”.