A domestic row probably caused a woman to go on the rampage in a German town that left four people dead, police said tonight.
Police closed down the centre of Loerrach, on the Swiss border, yesterday evening after the woman, a 41-year-old lawyer, ran out of a burning building and began firing shots in a nearby hospital, killing a nurse and wounding several others.
Officers shot and killed the woman in an exchange of fire in the hospital, police said.
The bodies of her estranged husband and their son were later found in the building she ran out of, where shots and an explosion had earlier rung out.
"We think this was a crime of passion," a spokesman for police in Loerrach said. It was still unclear what the dispute was about, he added.
Locals in the town of some 50,000 inhabitants were stunned by the events, said police spokesman Joachim Langanky.
"The people are deeply affected," he said.
The man had been shot, though blunt force - not a bullet - had caused the boy's death, police said, adding the two had been visiting the woman.
It was still uncertain who killed the boy, but it was "very probably" the woman, police said.
Police said the woman was a member of a shooting club. She had suffered a miscarriage in the hospital in 2004 but this could not be confirmed as a motive for the attack.
Germany has been debating tougher controls on gun ownership since a teenager went on the rampage in March 2009 in the southern town of Winnenden near Stuttgart, killing 15 people at his old school before shooting himself.
The boy's father went on trial on Thursday charged with failing to secure his gun properly. Both Winnenden and Loerrach are in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg.
Germany's worst school shooting was in April 2002, when a gunman killed 17 people, including himself, at a high school in the eastern city of Erfurt.
Reuters