Survivor: German shooter emptied magazine, calmly walked out

HANAU, Germany (AP):

Piter Minnemann and his friends were eating when they heard shots fired outside the door of the snack bar in Hanau where they had gathered.

Minnemann, 18, recalled that he had just got his pizza when the first shots were heard at the Arena Bar. It was the second site targeted in Wednesday night’s shooting of nine people by a German man who had posted an online rant calling for the “complete extermination” of many “races or cultures in our midst”.

“We thought it was a blank gun or something. We thought nothing of it,” he said. “Then the man came in, he fired.”

The gunman shot two people before coming into the bar, where “he aimed right at us – he shot the first one in the head,” Minnemann said.

A pregnant woman jumped out of the window, he said.

“He came, fired, emptied his magazine, then everything was quiet, then he walked out normally,” he recalled. “I opened my eyes, I saw that I was alive, I was happy.”

In all, Hanau native Minnemann said he lost four or five friends.

Another witness of the shooting at the Arena Bar told Turkey’s Haber television that he and his friends heard five or six shots outside before the gunman entered.

“He shot the first people he saw in the head. A man fell to the floor,”Muhammed Beyazkender, who was lying in his hospital bed with a bandaged shoulder, said on Thursday. “Then he fired at all of us. I got shot in the arm while I tried to hide behind the wall.”

Beyazkender said he lay on the floor on top of someone, and someone then lay on top of him, and someone else then on top of him.

“There was a kid underneath me with a hole in his throat,” he said. “The kid said to me: ‘My brother, I cannot feel my tongue; I cannot breathe.’”