A 24-year-old Swiss neo-Nazi, wanted for shooting a man on Saturday night, was arrested in a dramatic police operation in the northern German port city of Hamburg on Monday.
Some 40 German police officers were waiting for Sebastian Nussbaumer at Hamburg-Harburg station in the early hours of Monday morning, Swiss news website Blick reported. The station, which is near his girlfriend's home, was evacuated and the area cordoned off before his train arrived.
Armed with machine guns, the police were able to arrest Nussbaumer without incident after his train pulled in at 3:10am. According to media reports, the suspect was carrying a loaded pistol.
With a cluster of tattoos on his neck and forearms, Nussbaumer was apparently easy to spot. Among the tattoos is a symbol on his forearm representing Hitler's paramilitary force, the Stormtroopers, which it is illegal to display in Germany.
Nussbaumer is already well known to the police. In 2006 he attacked a group of Albanians with a knuckleduster while being filmed by another far-right extremist.
In 2007 he broke the noses of two men, one with a kick, the other with a head-butt, and beat a drunken man so badly that he suffered concussion. He spent 16 months in jail for these assaults.
In January, he was again sentenced to three years and three months for a variety of other crimes. Nussbaumer appealed the sentence, arguing that he had been sentenced more harshly than others because of his neo-Nazi beliefs.
He then went missing, but the Swiss were back on his trail when he seriously injured a man in a shooting incident in Zurich's old town on Saturday night. The victim is still in hospital, and Nussbaumer is likely to be charged with attempted murder.
According to Nussbaumer has other neo-Nazi friends living in the Hamburg area, as well as his girlfriend.
