German police rush to school after masked knife attack
German police commandos rushed to a secondary school near Bonn on Monday after a masked male armed with several knives injured at least one girl. --PHOTO: AFP
COLOGNE (Germany) - GERMAN police commandos rushed to a secondary school near Bonn on Monday after a masked male armed with several knives injured at least one girl, police said.
A police spokesman in nearby Cologne said that he was still on the loose.
Witnesses said that he entered the school at around 9am (3pm Singapore time) and attacked the girl, who has been taken to hospital, police said.
'At the present time what we know is that at around 9am a masked person apparently armed with several knives entered the Albert-Einstein-Gymnasium in St Augustin,' police spokesman Cathrin Maus said on N24 television.
'The school itself raised the alarm. Currently all the boys and girls are still in their classrooms. The police are at the scene,' she said. 'We think that the perpetrator is possibly still inside the school.'
Germany is on high alert after a 17-year-old shot dead 15 people at a school and in the surrounding area in Winnenden, southern Germany, in March before shooting himself in a firefight with police.
In January an unemployed man carried out a grisly attack at a nursery in Belgium, killing two infants aged six months and nine months and a 54-year-old nurse. -- AFP
