At least 10 people have been killed and many more injured in a shooting at a shopping centre in the German city of Munich.
It is understood the attacker is no longer at large after shooting himself in the head after opening fire at the Olympia-Einkaufszentrum mall.
Investigators say the “acute terror situation” had sparked the biggest police operation in Munich for more than a decade.
A dead man found one kilometre away from the scene of the shooting had a red backpack
A police spokesman said the shootings began in or outside the fast food branch shortly before 6pm local time and were witnessed by up to 100 people.
She told CNN: “I come out of the toilet and I hear like an alarm, boom, boom, boom.
“He’s killing the children. The children were sitting to eat. They can’t run.”
Sky’s Foreign Affairs Editor, Sam Kiley, says one of the suspected gunmen was confronted by a person filming on their mobile phone.
Employees and customers barricaded themselves inside shops as the attack took place.
But officers believe they have evacuated everyone from the complex and brought them to safety.
An employee who was inside the mall told Reuters by phone that many shots were fired.
The witness said they saw someone who was “so severely injured that he definitely didn’t survive”.
The entire transport network in Munich has been suspended, and the city’s main railway station evacuated.
Several highways north of Munich have also been sealed off by police.
There had been reports of a second shooting at the Stachus metro station in the city centre, about five miles away from the mall.
This has been denied by the Munich fire department.
Germany foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has said the motive for the “abhorrent act” has not been clarified.
He added that investigators have had to contend with “contradictory clues”.
This is the second attack in Germany in less than a week.
It happened on the fifth anniversary of a massacre which saw 77 people killed in Norway by right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik.
On Monday, a 17-year-old Afghan wounded four people in an axe and knife attack on a train near the Bavarian city of Wuerzberg.
