Europe 1 with AFP 2:49 p.m., January 24, 2022, modified at 2:50 p.m., January 24, 2022

A man with a "long gun" injured several people in a university lecture hall in Heidelberg, local police said, adding that the assailant had died.

Several people were injured on Monday in an attack by a man with a "long weapon" in a lecture hall at the University of Heidelberg in southwestern Germany, local police said, adding that the assailant was deceased.

"An individual injured several people in an amphitheater with a long weapon," Mannheim police said in a statement.

"The author himself is dead," she added, without specifying whether or not he had been shot by the police who arrived in large numbers on the spot.

According to information from the public broadcaster Südwestrundfunk (SWR), the university has asked its students by email not to go to the campus in the Neuenheimer Feld district for the moment.

However, there would be "no more imminent threat", according to SWR.

This university site, on the north bank of the Neckar river, notably hosts faculties of natural sciences, departments of the university hospital center and the botanical garden.

German firearms laws were tightened after two attacks on schools in the eastern city of Erfurt in April 2002 and in the southern city of Winnenden. west, in March 2009.