A 26-year-old man has shot his parents and four other members of his family dead with a semi-automatic weapon in southwest Germany before calling the police and waiting for them to arrest him.
The man, a German citizen who had a sport shooting licence, was in detention on Friday and would be questioned once his lawyer arrived, local police chief Reiner Moeller said.
"In the house and behind it, six dead people were found, three men aged 36, 65 and 69, and three women aged 36, 56 and 62," Mr Moeller said, adding that two of the dead were the man's parents.
The suspect "called the police station in (nearby town) Aalen at 12:48 pm to inform them he had shot several people," he told reporters.
The young man stayed on the line, and when the first officers arrived minutes later at the hotel where the shooting took place, they immediately arrested him outside.
Two others were injured, one of whom remained in critical condition, and two children, aged 12 and 14, were threatened but not physically harmed, he said.
"We don't yet know the motive, but we assume that it was a family drama, since as we understand they were all related," he said.
Images from the scene showed large numbers of emergency vehicles and heavily armed officers sealing off the area with red and white police tape.
Meanwhile, forensics teams dressed in white coveralls moved in to secure evidence.
The incident occurred at 12.45pm local time close to a building in the town of Rot am See in the federal state of Baden-Wuerttemberg.
The town is located some 135 km southeast of Frankfurt.
While owning firearms is not illegal in Germany, most guns can be acquired only with a licence and they are closely monitored, making mass shootings comparatively rare.
In October last year, a far-right attacker shot two people dead in the eastern city Halle, wounding several more after failing to break into a packed synagogue armed with home-made weapons.
In July 2016, a teenager used a pistol bought illegally online to kill nine people in a Munich shopping centre, before turning the weapon on himself.
Germany has also been the target of a number of jihadist attacks in recent years, although most of the perpetrators did not use guns.
The most deadly took place in December 2016, when Tunisian Anis Amri drove an articulated truck into a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 people.
with wires...
