A man wielding an ax on a street crowded with soccer fans was shot by the police on Sunday in Hamburg, Germany, only hours before the city was to host a game at the European soccer championships.
The man threatened police officers with “a pickax and an incendiary device,” a police spokesman said on Sunday. The police shot the man, who was injured and was being treated, they confirmed.
The incident took place in Hamburg’s entertainment district, a section of the city known as the Reeperbahn that is filled with restaurants and bars, and in an area packed with thousands of Dutch fans who had arrived to see the Netherlands play Poland on Sunday afternoon.
According to a spokeswoman for the Hamburg police, the man came out of a small restaurant with a double-bladed ax and a firebomb and threatened officers nearby.
The police initially deployed pepper spray and fired a warning shot into the air before shooting the attacker, according to Henning Hünerbein, a German journalist who was filming outside the restaurant.
The police said that the man had been injured, but they could not give any further updates on his condition. He was placed in an ambulance after the shooting and driven away. No fans or police officers were injured.
The site of the shooting was a 10-minute walk from the city’s official fan zone, which was thronged with many more thousands of fans at the time. It came on the third day of the monthlong tournament, which brings together the continent’s best 24 teams every four years.
The match between Poland and the Netherlands at the city’s Volksparkstadion, which has a capacity of about 57,000, was one of three games set to be played on Sunday.
The is a developing story and will be updated.
