Police said that several others were injured and that armed commandos with helicopters and dogs were hunting the gunman, who fled in the direction of the town centre at Winnenden near Stuttgart after the shooting.

The editor of the local paper, Frank Nipkau, told television channel N-TV that eight pupils and two adults were shot dead at the secondary school.

"The gunman just sprayed bullets all around him," the N-TV news channel cited an unnamed witness as saying.

Journalist Philipp Grohm from Stuttgart radio told the same channel that the gunman had used a machine gun.

Europe has been scarred by a number of fatal school shootings in recent years, at least three of them in Germany.

In February 2002, a 22-year-old gunman killed the headmaster and seriously injured another person in a vocational training establishment he attended at Freising, near Munich.

Two months later, 16 people were killed at a high-school in Erfurt in eastern Germany, by a 19-year-old former student, who then killed himself.

In November 2006, a former student at a vocational school in Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany went a shooting spree in the establishment, injuring 37 people before turning his gun on himself.

In the US southern state of Alabama on Tuesday, a gunman killed at least 10 people before killing himself, local authorities and state police said.

Authorities began to uncover the grisly aftermath of the gunman’s rage late Tuesday afternoon, when four adults and a child were found shot dead inside a residence in the town of Samson, Alabama officials said.

AFP / Expatica