One person has been arrested after German police stormed a pharmacy in Karlsruhe where people had been taken hostage.

Multiple police wearing tactical gear have stormed into a German pharmacy where hostages were being held, and have arrested one person.

Explosions have been heard at the site, in the western German city of Karlsruhe, according to a Reuters witness.

Earlier German police said there was no danger to the broader public.
The incident follows Thursday’s deadly rampage at a Jehovah’s

Witnesses hall in Hamburg, putting the country on edge.

Gun violence is rare in Germany.

Police in Karlsruhe cordoned off an area in the central part of the city on Friday and urged residents to avoid the area.

A large number of officers were deployed to the site at about 4.30pm local time, a police spokesperson said, but declined to disclose for tactical reasons how many hostages were taken or how many police were on the ground.

The Stuttgarter Zeitung reported that two people had been taken hostage and that there was a demand for a ransom of a single-digit million euro sum.

The police spokesperson declined to comment on the report.
Earlier Germany’s Bild newspaper had reported that the police were in contact with the alleged hostage-taker.

Karlsruhe, not far from the French border, is a city of 300,000 people and home to the Federal Court of Justice, Germany’s highest court.