Murder Suspects Arrested

The men, aged 29 and 31, were arrested on Monday in a rental car during a "routine check" on a road near the northern city of Bremen, said Petra Guderian of the Rotenburg police.

The shootings took place in the early hours of Monday in the Lin Yue restaurant in the small town of Sittensen, situated between Bremen and Hamburg.

Guderian told a press conference that a document "linked to the scene of the crime" was found in the car as well as traces of white powder which one of the men said was cocaine.

The news Web site Spiegel Online quoted police sources as saying the paper showed a hand-drawn map of the scene of the crime.

Three apartments belonging to the Vietnamese men in Bremen and nearby Ahlhorn were subsequently searched.

The suspects are refusing to cooperate with police.

Guderian said the motive for the killings remained unclear.

The suspects were arrested about 80 kilometers (50 miles) away from the crime scene, on the A1 autobahn that passes Sittensen. Several witnesses claimed to have seen a car on Sunday of the same description as that of the two men, police said.

Identities remain unclear

Three men and three women were found tied up and shot dead in the restaurant in the early hours of Monday, while a man found at the scene with serious gunshot wounds died of his injuries in hospital on Tuesday.

Four of the seven victims have been identified. They included the owners of the restaurant, a Hong Kong Chinese couple who were British passport holders. He was aged 36, she was 28.

Their two-year-old daughter was found unharmed at the restaurant and was in good health, police said.

A 36-year-old woman of Malaysian origin who worked as a waitress at the restaurant was also among the dead. Her husband had raised the alarm when he arrived at the restaurant to pick up his wife from work.

The other victim was a 31-year-old Thai man from Wolfenbüttel.

The identity of the remaining three dead is still being established.

Investigation continues


The police have refused to respond to speculation on whether a gang was responsible for the killings or possible motives. They said the investigation was exploring all possibilities.

"But they are now concentrated on the two suspects as well as the roughly 100 tip-offs from the population so far," said chief investigator Andreas Tschirner of the state crime office in Hanover, which took over the case on Wednesday.

The restaurant had been popular in Sittensen. Many locals have placed flowers or lit candles in front of the building in the days since the killings.