Two 13-year-old girls were seriously injured in an attack at Welfen-Gymnasium, a secondary school in Schongau, Upper Bavaria, on Wednesday. A 16-year-old suspect was arrested at the scene, and police believe the individual acted alone, according to BBC.

Neither of the two injured girls is in a life-threatening condition, police said. The overall scope of the incident remains only partly established: authorities said the number of other people involved and the severity of any additional injuries were still being clarified as of the time of reporting.

The nature of the weapon used has not been confirmed. A police spokeswoman told AFP it was unclear what weapon had been deployed and declined to confirm circulating reports describing it as a knife attack — a notable gap in an otherwise fast-moving information flow, and one investigators have not yet closed. Police have characterized the incident as a "rampage" (Amoklauf), a term in German policing that typically denotes an indiscriminate, non-targeted assault rather than a dispute between specific individuals, though officials have not yet said whether that characterization will hold as the investigation develops.

The identity of the suspect has not been released, and it remains unclear whether the 16-year-old had any prior connection to Welfen-Gymnasium — as a student, former student, or otherwise. That question will likely shape how investigators classify motive, and whether the case is treated as a targeted act or a broader public-safety threat.

A large contingent of police officers and rescue workers was deployed to the school following the incident, per Rhein-Zeitung and FAZ/dpa, both citing Germany's dpa wire service. Authorities set up a contact point for relatives and parents of students at a fire station in Schongau — a standard crisis-response measure in German school-incident protocols, intended to centralize family communication away from an active scene and reduce the risk of parents converging on the school itself.

Welfen-Gymnasium has a long institutional history in the region. Founded in 1887, it was initially almost exclusively a girls' school before becoming co-educational roughly 40 years ago, according to the BBC report. Schongau itself is a small town in Upper Bavaria, and an incident of this scale at a single secondary school there will register locally in a way that is disproportionate to the town's size — the kind of case where the surrounding community, not just the school itself, becomes part of the story in the days ahead.

German authorities and media have historically applied significant caution in the early hours of school-violence incidents, withholding suspect identity and weapon details pending confirmation — a pattern consistent with what's unfolding here, where police have declined to confirm even widely reported specifics like the knife claim. That reticence reflects both German privacy law, which restricts identifying juvenile suspects, and standard investigative practice of not confirming details that could compromise the case or spread before verification.

The classification of the event as a rampage rather than a targeted assault carries procedural weight in Germany, where such cases typically trigger a distinct set of prosecutorial and psychiatric-evaluation protocols given the suspect's status as a minor. If confirmed as a rampage with no prior relationship between suspect and victims, the case will likely draw comparisons to other German school-violence incidents that have periodically renewed debate over youth mental health services, weapons access, and school security measures — though any such policy discussion would be premature pending basic facts about motive and method that investigators have not yet disclosed.

What is established at this point is narrow but significant: two young victims, one suspect in custody, and a police force still working through the basic contours of what happened. Fuller details — on the weapon, the suspect's background, and any connection to the school — are expected as the investigation progresses.