A 22-year-old has died after he was shot by officers during a police chase in south-western Germany, prosecutors said on Sunday.<\/p>\n
The incident unfolded at around 1 am (2300 GMT Saturday) after a vehicle attempted to evade a police check north-east of Saarbr\u00fccken, a city on the French border some 150 kilometres from Frankfurt.<\/p>\n
The 22-year-old was driving the vehicle carrying two more men, a 23-year-old and a 19-year-old.<\/p>\n
The 19-year-old sitting in the back seat was injured in the chase, a spokesman for prosecutors in Saarbr\u00fccken said.<\/p>\n
A female officer was said to have been injured when the vehicle tried to turn around in a cul-de-sac as it was attempting to get away from police, prosecutors said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Officers then fired shots at the vehicle, which came to a halt. The 22-year-old driver died due to his injuries.<\/p>\n
The injured police officer was released from hospital on Sunday afternoon, prosecutors said, but declined to give further details pointing to ongoing investigations.<\/p>\n
Multiple police officers were deployed to the scene of the shooting on Sunday, crowding the narrow cul-de-sac where the vehicle had come to a halt, according to a dpa reporter at the scene.<\/p>\n
The windshield of a blue car parked on the street was punctured by a hole and the window on the driver’s side was broken.<\/p>\n
A resident told dpa that she had heard shots ringing out at night.<\/p>\n
Under the police law of the state of Saarland, where the incident took place, officers are only allowed to use firearms against people “to render them incapable of attack or escape, provided that this objective cannot be achieved by using firearms against property.”<\/p>\n
A shot that is “almost certainly” lethal is permissible if it is the only means of averting an immediate threat to life or serious injury.<\/p>\n
Tobias Singelnstein, professor for criminology and criminal law at Frankfurt’s Goethe University, noted that regulations governing the use of firearms are relatively detailed, describing it as “the very last resort.”<\/p>\n
“Only when nothing else works or has worked may a firearm be used,” he told dpa.<\/p>\n
Hitting a moving target is extremely difficult, the expert noted.<\/p>\n
An “ordinary police officer” would not be able to shoot with that kind of precision, Singelnstein said. “When the car is moving, it’s difficult for someone with average skills.”<\/p>\n
It was initially unclear how many shots were fired in the incident, and by how many officers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 22-year-old has died after he was shot by officers during a police chase in south-western Germany, prosecutors…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2360,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5,2597,2598,2596,82,2599],"class_list":["post-2359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-germany","tag-police-chase","tag-police-check","tag-police-officer","tag-prosecutors","tag-saarbruecken"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2359\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}