Police give all clear at Hamburg school after fears of armed youth entry

BERLIN (Reuters) -Police said their search of a school in the northern German city of Hamburg on Tuesday yielded no unusual findings after earlier concern an armed youth may have entered the building.

“We can give the all clear for the time being,” the police said on Twitter. “The investigations on the ground will continue though. The pupils can now leave the area.”

Police had earlier said it was not clear whether the armed person had entered the school in or was only passing by.

More than 1,300 students attend the Otto-Hahn-School Hamburg’s Jenfeld district, a secondary all-day school, according to its website.

Police had asked parents, worried about their children, to wait at a parking lot close to the school as long as the school area was sealed off.

Germany has strict laws which require gun-holders to fulfil criteria on age and weapons expertise to obtain a firearms license.

In 2009, a 17-year-old killed 15 people in the southern town of Winnenden near Stuttgart in a shooting spree that started at his former school. The country’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.

(Reporting by Zuzanna Szymanska, Riham Alkousaa and Sarah Marsh, Editing by Maria Sheahan, Peter Graff and Angus MacSwan)