Stuttgart, Germany - A man wielding a samurai sword killed a 43-year-old woman and seriously wounded three other people during a service in a Protestant church in this southern German city, authorities said.
The 25-year-old assailant was likely an ethnic Tamil, as were most of the 70 members of the congregation, police said, adding that they suspected a personal and not a political motive.
"There are cut-off limbs lying around the church," a police spokeswoman said, adding that a man and woman among the injured were fighting for their lives.
Officers "were greeted by a scene of horror" after responding to an emergency call around 3:48 pm (1348 GMT), the spokeswoman said.
The attacker wounded one man in the neck, sliced off the hand of another and dealt a possibly fatal blow to a woman's chest.
The parishioners, nearly half of whom were children, shielded themselves with chairs as the man ran amok. Many were able to escape the church, running screaming into the streets, while police overpowered the assailant using a tear gas bomb.
Sixty-five people who witnessed the bloodbath were given psychological counseling, NTV rolling news channel reported.
A German church was last the scene of a bloodbath on Christmas Eve 1996 when a deranged German man aiming to commit suicide set off two grenades in a Protestant house of worship, killing two women as well as himself and wounding 13 parishioners.