Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has called the killing of 15 people by a teenager an incomprehensible crime that has left her nation in mourning.

Her comments came in the wake of a shooting rampage by a teenage former student on Wednesday in southwest Germany.

Tim Kretschmer opened fire at the Albertville high school in the small market town of Winnenden, killing nine students and three teachers before stealing a car and fleeing the scene.

The 17-year-old attacker later took his own life after a shootout with police in the town of Wendlingen, near Stuttgart.

No apparent motive

A video taken on a mobile phone showed Kretschmer at a car dealership where he killed three people, then himself.

There was no immediate indication of motive, but the victims were mostly female: eight of nine students killed were girls, and all three teachers were women.

In video

Germany in shock after deadly shooting spree
 

Three men were killed later as the suspect fled.

The massacre occurred just hours after a man went on the rampage in the southern US state of Alabama, killing 10 people before also turning the gun on himself.

Speaking for a nation stunned by the crime, Chancellor Merkel said: “It is unimaginable that in just seconds, pupils and teachers were killed, it is an appalling crime. This is a day of mourning for the whole of Germany.”

Wolfgang Schauble, the German interior minister, ordered flags across the country to be flown at half mast on Thursday as a mark of respect for the dead.

Church services took place on Wednesday in Winnenden, which has a population around 27,000.

Dressed in black

Dressed in black combats, Kretschmer had entered the school at about 9:30am local time [08:30 GMT] and opened fire, killing nine students aged between 14 and 15, and three teachers.

A passer-by died after Kretschmer stole the car, and two passers-by died in the final shootout between him and the police.

Erwin Hetger, a regional police chief, said: “He went into the school with a weapon and carried out a bloodbath. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”
 
Konrad Gelden, the local police chief, said the teenager was “constantly reloading his weapon”.

Mark Seddon, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Winnenden, said: “There are many grieving parents. It’s a very, very sad scene.

“He [Kretschmer] was a loner, he didn’t graduate. He had an interest in the occult and his father was a member of a gun club. They had 16 guns in the house.

“He left no message and so far there appears to be no motive.

“People are full of praise for the swift reaction of the police … the death toll could have been higher. The police found other munitions in the grounds so this was clearly planned.”
‘Quiet student’
Petra Wischgoll, a journalist in Cologne, told Al Jazeera that police believe the suspect had finished school last year.

“He was always a very quiet student, who never did anything, and wasn’t really big in the picture,” she said.
A local police chief said the shooter was ‘constantly reloading his weapon’ [Reuters]
“He was very quiet and nobody ever thought of him much. So everybody is very surprised that it was him doing the shooting.”

Lothar Becker, a journalist with ZDF, a German broadcaster, told Al Jazeera the suspect was “a normal young guy, from a family with no financial problems, in an area with no criminal problems”.

He said it was “probably the worst school massacre we ever had in Germany”.

The attack is indeed Germany’s worst school shooting since 2002, when 16 people were killed at a high school in Erfurt in eastern Germany by a 19-year-old former student, who then turned the gun on himself.

In November 2006, a former student at a vocational school in Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany went a shooting spree, injuring 37 people before killing himself.