BERLIN -Police searched a school in the northern German city of Hamburg on Tuesday as an armed youth may have entered the building, they said on Twitter.
Police said it was not clear whether the armed person had entered the school in Hamburg's Jenfeld district or was only passing by. A spokesperson for the police said the search was still ongoing, with special units, and that no gunshots had been heard or reported so far.
More than 1,300 students attend the Otto-Hahn-School, a secondary all-day school, according to its website.
Police asked parents, worried about their children, to wait at a parking lot close to the school as long as the school area was sealed off.
Germany has strict laws which require gun-holders to fulfil criteria on age and weapons expertise to obtain a firearms license.
In 2009, a 17-year-old killed 15 people in the southern town of Winnenden near Stuttgart in a shooting spree that started at his former school. The country's worst school shooting was in April 2002, when a gunman killed 17 people, including himself, at a high school in the eastern city of Erfurt.