Son of recreational hunter shoots father and neighbour
In Innichen (South Tyrol), the 50-year-old son of a recreational hunter shot his ailing father and a neighbour. Police cordoned off the area on a large scale.
On the night of Saturday to Sunday, 18 August 2024, a tragic act of violence occurred in Innichen in South Tyrol, shaking the community to its core.
Two people died. The authorities cordoned off the area extensively. A civil protection alert was issued.
Following these two killings, the alleged perpetrator barricaded himself — a 50-year-old from Innichen and son of a former hunting warden — with his father's weapon in his apartment. On Sunday morning, a special unit of the Carabinieri forced their way into the building.
At around 10:30 a.m., a shootout with security forces occurred during the storming of the apartment building in Innichen. The man turned the weapon on himself and suffered life-threatening injuries to his neck.
The storming of the scene
The full extent of the violent act only became clear after the storming: it emerged that there was a second fatality — the approximately 90-year-old father of the alleged perpetrator, Hermann Kühbacher, who was in need of care.
The first victim was Waltraud Jud — the perpetrator's neighbour. She had been startled by noise during the night and had come to the apartment.
The drama had begun with a gas alarm. When the fire brigade and Carabinieri arrived at the apartment, the alleged perpetrator opened fire.
Security forces cordoned off the area extensively and surrounded the building. Late in the morning, they stormed the apartment. Shortly afterwards, the public was informed that the danger had passed. The road closures were lifted.
More on the subject of recreational hunting: In the dossier Poaching and hunting crime in Switzerland we document cases, legal questions and recurring patterns. What the research says about this is shown by Hunting fact-checked: the state of research.
The position of IG Wild beim Wild: IG Wild beim Wild rejects recreational hunting. Our model is the canton of Geneva, which has managed without recreational hunting since 1974: without hunting seasons, without hunting dogs, without driven hunts, without high seats, without the animal cruelty and crime that go hand in hand with hunting season elsewhere. What has worked there for over fifty years disproves every position paper by JagdSchweiz. An association that bases its policy on claims it refutes in its own documents is not a professional organisation, but a factory for misinformation.
