Two police officers were shot dead on Monday during a traffic check in southwestern Germany, causing a stir in this country where a vast operation to search for the murderers on the run was underway. The two officers, a 29-year-old man and a 24-year-old woman, were shot dead around 4:20 a.m. (0320 GMT) on a country road near Kusel, a town not far from Kaiserslautern in the Rhineland regional state. Palatinate (west).
A “terrible act”
This crime aroused stupor: the Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, spoke of an “execution”. “Regardless of the motive: this crime is akin to an execution and shows that the police risk their lives every day for our safety”, she underlined. The police said they did not know the motives of the killers and urged motorists not to pick up hitchhikers. The leader of the Rhineland-Palatinate region, Marlu Dreyer, said she was “deeply upset” by this “appalling act”, while the regional Minister of the Interior, Roger Lewentz, insisted on “the great brutality” with which both victims were shot.
The search operations have been extended to the neighboring regional state of Saarland, not far from the French border, the police said on Twitter. “No description of the perpetrators (of these shots) or the vehicle used for the escape has been established,” said the Kaiserslautern police, who also said they did not know in which direction the killers fled and how many there were. The region in which the murders took place is a rural area of forests and grasslands.
Shot in the head
According to the daily website Picture, the police were shot in the head by poachers. They radioed shortly before being shot that they had stopped a suspicious vehicle with dead game in the trunk. “Colleagues reported that shots had been fired,” West Palatinate police spokesman Bernhard Christian Erfort told Welt.TV. “Then we lost radio contact (…) The intervention forces then went to the scene and found the colleagues, one injured the other dead”, he added without confirming the details. information on possible poachers.
The young policewoman did not even have time to draw her weapon, continued Bild citing sources close to the investigation. The other officer fired shots before being injured and succumbing to his wounds shortly afterwards. The 24-year-old agent was in training, the regional interior ministry said.