Swiss Police Hunt Gunman After Fatal Rave Shooting Near Zurich
Swiss police were searching Sunday for at least one gunman after a shooting at an overnight rave in the northern Swiss town of Aarau, near Zurich, left a 22-year-old Italian woman dead and five other people wounded, some of them seriously.
The attack took place in the early hours at the Aarauer Rave, an annual techno event at the Aarau racetrack that drew about 3,500 people from Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning. Shots rang out just before 3 a.m., according to local media. Police said four men and one woman, aged between 24 and 27, were taken to hospital with injuries ranging from minor to serious.
Italy’s foreign ministry confirmed the dead woman was Italian and said officials from its embassy in Switzerland were heading to the scene to closely follow the investigation.
The shooting was a rare outbreak of gun violence in Switzerland, a country with a longstanding tradition of firearms ownership but almost no recent history of attacks of this kind. The last major shooting occurred in 2001, when a gunman killed 14 members of the cantonal parliament and local government in Zug before taking his own life.
Investigators said they had not established any motive or determined how many attackers were involved.
“For the moment, we have no reliable information regarding the perpetrators. We do not know whether it is a single person or several, nor whether they fled in a vehicle or on foot,” police spokesman Bernhard Graser told reporters.
“Certain elements suggest they may no longer be in the area, but we have still deployed a significant police presence in the region so that we can arrest them if they are still there.”
The area around the shooting remained sealed off as officers searched for clues and interviewed eyewitnesses. An AFP journalist saw armed police deployed at the scene, at the railway station and on highways up to 30 kilometers (18 miles) away. With the German border only a few dozen kilometers away, the investigation was being carried out in cooperation with police in Freiburg, according to German news agency DPA.
Media reports said an army helicopter was deployed over Aarau, the capital of Aargau canton, along with numerous police officers, rescue workers and medical teams. Aargau cantonal police urged people to stay away from the area and asked anyone with video recordings or photos from the rave to share them with investigators.
Witnesses told the Blick newspaper that shots were fired at about 2:30 a.m. while the rave was still underway. Some initially thought the sounds were fireworks, but one witness reported “shots fired in bursts.” Many partygoers sheltered in a nearby gymnasium.
Swiss DJ Tekibo, who performed at the rave, wrote on Instagram that he was physically unharmed but deeply affected by the tragedy, saying he had lost a friend.
“Techno and raves are supposed to be spaces of freedom and safety, never places where something like this happens,” he said, calling the events “absolutely heartbreaking.” “I’m still trying to process what happened because I lost an important friend and I don’t have the right words for it.”
A local resident posted video on social media showing deserted streets and what sounded like gunshots in the background.
Police said all of the victims were Swiss residents. No arrests had been announced by Sunday afternoon.
The violence has raised fresh questions about public safety at large open-air gatherings in Switzerland, even as the country remains far less affected by mass shootings than many other parts of the world. The shooting also drew attention to Switzerland’s distinctive gun culture: army reservists are allowed to keep their service weapons at home, though not ammunition, and there is no federal firearms registry. According to the Geneva-based research center Small Arms Survey, civilians held more than 2.3 million firearms in 2017 — nearly three for every 10 inhabitants — making Switzerland the 16th-ranked country in the world for guns per capita.
For a country where deadly attacks like this have been virtually nonexistent since the 2001 Zug shooting, the overnight violence in Aarau was a jarring reminder that even generally safe places can be touched by tragedy. The investigation is expected to take days.