Iranian armed with ax and knife takes hostages on train, shot dead

By Kate Brady

BERLIN — An Iranian asylum seeker was shot dead by police in Switzerland after taking 15 people hostage on a train, authorities reported Friday.

Armed with an ax and knife, the man, 32, held the hostages on a train in the town of Essert-sous-Champvent in the Swiss canton of Vaud near the French border for almost four hours on Thursday night.

“The hostages were all released unharmed,” police in the Vaud canton said in a statement on Friday that only identified the man as an Iranian asylum seeker. “The hostage taker was fatally wounded during the intervention.”

The ordeal began around 6:35 p.m. local time, after the train driver was forced to leave his post and join the passengers. Police said the hostage taker spoke a mixture of Farsi and English.

Alerted by people trapped on the train, around 60 officers arrived at the scene soon after and closed off the area, about 40 miles west of the Swiss capital of Bern.

An ambulance drives past a road blocked by Swiss gendarmes leading to a train station in the town of Essert-sous-Champvent. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images)

Negotiations with the hostage-taker were carried out with the help of a Farsi interpreter and partially over the messaging service WhatsApp on hostages’ cellphones. At a press briefing following the incident, Prosecutor General Eric Kaltenrieder said authorities ultimately decided to storm.

“The intervention was launched in the moment when the hostage-taker left the train in which the hostages were located to move away, for reasons that we do not know,” Kaltenrieder said. “And it was at this moment that the police decided to intervene and secure the hostages who were there.”

A video clip posted on X, formerly Twitter, shows the stationary train before several strong, very bright explosions accompanied by loud detonations in short succession. Police later addressed the video and said the blasts were a tactic to separate the man from the hostages.

“There is, it seems, a stun grenade that was used and then, in any case, a shot was fired which led to the death of the hostage taker,” Kaltenrieder said.

Vaud canton police spokesman Jean-Christophe Sauterel told Swiss media that the hostage-taker was shot by an officer after the man stormed toward the emergency team with his ax.

“A police officer used his weapon to protect the hostages and fatally hit the perpetrator,” Sauterel said. The man died at the scene.

The hostages received medical and psychological care and were taken to a police station and were questioned. Relatives were also waiting for them.

The motive behind the incident remains unclear, according to police. “No element points us toward a terrorist act. Neither terrorist nor jihadist,” Sauterel told Swiss media Friday, adding that investigations to clarify the circumstances of the attack are ongoing.

By Kate Brady

Kate Brady is a researcher and reporter based in The Washington Post's Berlin bureau. She has been at The Post since early 2023 and has been reporting from Germany for the best part of a decade. Twitter