Vehren said police were alerted to the shooting at about 9.15pm and were at the scene quickly.
He said that after officers arrived and found people with apparent gunshot wounds on the ground floor, they heard a shot from an upper floor and found a fatally wounded person upstairs who may have been a shooter. He added that police did not have to use their firearms.
“We heard shots,” one unnamed witness told reporters. “There were 12 continuous shots… then we saw how people were taken away in black bags.”
Student Laura Bauch, who lives nearby, said there were “about four periods of shooting”, German news agency dpa reported.
“There were … several shots in these periods, roughly at intervals of 20 seconds to a minute,” she said.
There was no immediate indication that a shooter was on the run and it appeared likely that the perpetrator was either in the building or among the dead, said the police spokesperson.
Police said they had no immediate information on a possible motive. Vehren said that “the background is still completely unclear”.
Hamburg Mayor Peter Tschentscher tweeted: “I extend my deepest sympathy to the families of the victims. The forces are working at full speed to pursue the perpetrators and clarify the background.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
