Two police officers were shot dead on Monday January 31 during a roadside check in the south-west of the country, where a large search operation for fugitive murderers is underway.
The two officers, a 29-year-old man and a 24-year-old woman, were shot dead early Monday morning at around 4.20 a.m. on a country road near Kusel, a town near Kaiserslautern in the regional state of Rhineland-Palatinate (West).
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The police said they did not know the motives of the killers and urged motorists not to pick up hitchhikers.
Search operation in progress
The leader of the Rhineland-Palatinate region, Malu Dreyer, said to herself “deeply upset” by this “terrible act”, while the regional Minister of the Interior, Roger Lewentz, insisted on “great brutality” with which the two 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 or the vehicle used for the leak 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.
According to the daily website Picture, the police were shot in the head by poachers. They radioed shortly before being shot to report that they had stopped a suspicious vehicle with dead game in the trunk.
“Colleagues reported that shots were fired”, explained on the Welt channel a spokesman for the West Palatinate police, Bernhard Christian Erfort. “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 information about possible poachers.
The young policewoman did not even have time to draw her weapon, continued Picture, citing sources familiar with the investigation. The other officer fired shots before being injured and succumbing to his wounds shortly afterwards. The agent was being trained, said the regional interior ministry.