Patient kills doctor, commits suicide at Berlin hospital

BERLIN: A patient shot and killed a doctor before turning the gun on himself at a Berlin hospital on Tuesday, police said, adding there was no sign the incident was a terrorist attack.

A police spokeswoman told AFP that several shots were fired at a university hospital in the well-heeled southwestern Steglitz neighbourhood of the German capital.

"According to preliminary information, a patient at the hospital shot a doctor and then killed himself," she said.

"The doctor is in intensive care," the spokeswoman said, adding there was "no indication this was a terror attack".

Berlin police later tweeted that the doctor had died of his wounds.

The shooting came with Germany already on edge after four brutal attacks in the south of the country.

A Syrian asylum seeker blew himself up outside a music festival and wounded 15 other people in Ansbach on Sunday, six days after four passengers on a train and a passer-by were wounded in an axe attack by another asylum seeker in Wuerzburg.

The Islamic State group claimed both attacks.

On Friday, nine people were killed in a shopping centre shooting spree in Munich by a German-Iranian teenager with a history of psychological problems but no apparent links to jihadists.

And a Syrian refugee killed a 45-year-old Polish woman with a large kebab knife on Sunday at a snack bar in the southwestern city of Reutlingen.

Police concluded that the incident, in which three others were injured, was likely a "crime of passion".