BERLIN – Hours of panic in a high school in Cologne, in North Rhine Westphalia (Germany), for “an armed man” who would have been identified by a student. But the police, intervened with a large deployment of forces in the Kreuzgasse high school immediately evacuated (at least thirty flying cars were sent to the scene, along with a couple of helicopters and several fire trucks), found no one, no killers, nor suspects. Thus, the alarm went off in the afternoon. Probably it was a hoax or a bad joke, even if the police have not yet expressed themselves about it.

According to the local newspaper Kölner Stadtanzeiger, around noon a student would have seen “a stranger with a weapon-like object” on the third floor of the school. Immediately, the high school principal raised the alarm. School evacuated and agents hunting man.

The “suspect”, according to testimonies, was a 20-30 year old man, with a black leather jacket and a stubble beard. But, as Benjamin Sack wrote of the German tabloid Bild , who rushed to the scene, it was immediately understood that there were neither dead nor wounded.
The Spezialeinsatzkommando (Sek), the special forces of the German police, immediately inspected and searched the school, while the whole area around the building was manned for hours, but no suspicion was detected. According to the Kölnische Rundschau, only one teacher was briefly stopped by the special forces, but was immediately released by the police. Tomorrow the lessons will take place regularly, so that already in the early afternoon the students were able to resume their own things left in the classes.
However, even immediately after the alarm, the agents have always and officially denied any news of “exploded shots” cited by some media. About a thousand students are enrolled in the school and about eighty teachers work there.