They Came to Check His Guns, and He Shot Them: A 60-Year-Old Killed Two Officials in a Bavarian Village

A 54-year-old official and her 45-year-old colleague from the Neumarkt district office, in the Bavarian region of the Upper Palatinate, set out on the afternoon of October 8 on a routine task: to check whether a resident of the village of Berngau was storing his firearms the way the law requires. Neither of them came back from that address.

At around 2 p.m., police received several calls about sounds like gunfire. Officers surrounded the house and found the 45-year-old official in front of it - dead. The suspect, a 60-year-old German, called the emergency line himself: he said he was in the flat, that he had firearms, admitted he had fired and announced that he would not give up without a fight.

Berngau is a village of around 2,600 people. For hours it was under lockdown: a helicopter over the rooftops, an armoured vehicle in the street, and residents under police orders not to leave their homes. Later, while securing the building, police also found the body of the 54-year-old official. According to police, she most likely died instantly, during the shooting.

The negotiations went on for a long time - by phone, with a man who kept repeating that he would not surrender. In the middle of the night, police units entered the house using explosives. "It certainly didn't happen without resistance, because the officers also had to shoot," a police spokeswoman said. The suspect was lightly wounded in the leg and taken into custody. Police are saying nothing about the motive for now.

This is not a story about a system that failed. Two officials came to check whether guns were locked away properly, and one man decided to shoot at them. The two of them were doing the most ordinary, most bureaucratic work of the state - the kind of check nobody imagines could end in death.

Germany has some of the strictest gun ownership rules in Europe, with checks that reach the owner's front door. If there, with registers and inspections, a routine check can end like this, how many weapons left over from the nineties are still lying unregistered in Balkan attics - and who is even knocking on those doors?