Swiss police arrest man, 43, after rave shooting kills Italian woman

Swiss police arrested a 43-year-old man early on Monday 31 August on strong suspicion of carrying out a shooting at a rave in the northern town of Aarau that killed a 22-year-old Italian woman and wounded five other people, Aargau Cantonal Police said. The arrest, shortly before 1 a.m., ended an international manhunt that had drawn in officers on both sides of the German border.

The man, a Swiss national, was apprehended shortly before 1 a.m. Monday, the cantonal force said. He was arrested on strong suspicion of having committed the crime, and investigators believe a single attacker was involved. No charge against him has been announced.

The woman killed was named by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as Maria Spinelli. She died at the scene at the Schachen horse racing track in Aarau, where an annual rave was winding down when gunfire broke out in the early hours of Sunday. Police said several shots were fired at a group of people as partygoers were preparing to go home, and that Spinelli died despite attempts to resuscitate her.

An arrest ends a cross-border search

Authorities were alerted around 2:30 a.m. local time on Sunday 30 August to the shooting in Aarau, the capital of Aargau canton. The event, billed as 'Aarau Rave VOL. 7,' was being held at the horse racing track in the town's Schachen district, Swiss public broadcaster SRF reported. The fire department cordoned off a large area around the site as officers, firefighters and ambulances arrived in large numbers.

• Saturday 29 August: the Aarau Rave VOL. 7 runs from 3 p.m. at the Schachen racecourse
• Sunday 30 August, about 2.30 a.m.: shots fired as the event breaks up, killing one woman and wounding five
• Sunday 30 August: a nationwide manhunt, with German officers joining across the border
• Monday 31 August, shortly before 1 a.m.: a 43-year-old Swiss man arrested on strong suspicion
• Wednesday 2 September: Aargau police due to give the next briefing

Four men and one woman were taken to hospital with injuries ranging from minor to severe. In its statement on Monday, Aargau police described the wounded as four Swiss men and a German woman, aged between 24 and 31. Earlier accounts from the force had given their ages as 24 to 27 and described all of the victims as residents of Switzerland. Police did not release any of the names, citing Swiss privacy rules.

Meloni had said on Sunday evening that two of the injured were also Italian citizens, an account that did not match the nationalities police set out the following day. Italy has not withdrawn it, and the two sets of statements have not been reconciled. Blick has reported that dual Swiss and Italian citizenship cannot be excluded, which would account for the difference. Police, citing privacy rules, released no names that might have settled it.

Before the arrest, the search had involved virtually the entire Aargau police force and spread nationwide, drawing in the cantonal forces of Zurich, Solothurn and Bern. Officers in Freiburg, in neighboring Germany, joined the effort, the German news agency dpa reported. Residents around the racecourse were asked to stay away while investigators combed the area for anything linked to the crime. Police said on Sunday afternoon that they had ruled out the possibility that the attacker could pose a further threat, but the force's commander, Michael Leupold, said that evening that a residual risk remained while the gunman was free.

Police had said early on that they could not exclude the involvement of more than one suspect, and they appealed for anyone with photographs or video from the event to come forward. Officers took the remaining ravegoers to a nearby gym, where many of them were questioned as the investigation got under way. The gym became a temporary base for interviews as officers tried to reconstruct the final minutes of the event.

What police have said about a motive

The motive and the exact circumstances of the shooting remain unclear, police said. A police spokesperson, Bernhard Graser, told reporters on Sunday that officers had no information yet on why the shots were fired, and he cautioned against treating the attack as terrorism given how far the event had already progressed when it happened.

the fact that the rave was already winding down suggests that's not the case. A fight could also be a possibility.

Graser described the shooting as extraordinary for Switzerland, where public shootings are rare despite widespread gun ownership. He said the incident was unique in recent years and that the scale of the police presence reflected how unusual it was. The full extent of what had happened was not yet known, he said, but the circumstances alone made it something out of the ordinary.

At a briefing on Sunday, before the suspect was in custody, Graser said the manhunt was continuing nonstop at full speed, with almost the whole cantonal force out on the streets. Officers had no information on where the suspect might be.

An eyewitness told the Swiss newspaper Blick that the music stopped suddenly around 2:30 a.m. and that he heard gunshots a minute or two later, initially taking them for fireworks. As he walked across an open yard, he recalled hearing a shot ring out and seeing that a woman had been hit. Despite attempts to save her, she died, he told the paper.

The scene at the racecourse

Ravegoers first mistook the gunfire for fireworks until someone shouted for everyone to get down, Blick reported. The shooting happened just after the event had ended.

The Aargau Racing Club, which runs the horse racing track, said on its website that it was shocked by the shooting and extended its sympathy to everyone affected and their families as they faced a difficult and trying situation. It also thanked the emergency responders and everyone else who had worked professionally at the scene.

Aarau had about 22,900 residents at the end of 2025 and lies roughly 12 miles south of the German border and 30 miles west of Zurich by road. A major police operation continued through the afternoon of Sunday 30 August as investigators searched the area for links to the crime, and locals were repeatedly urged to keep their distance while the work went on.

Switzerland has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in Europe, and shootings there remain rare. In 2019, Swiss voters approved tighter gun control rules in a national referendum.

The country's deadliest mass shooting took place in September 2001, when a gunman opened fire in the cantonal assembly in Zug, killing 11 members of the cantonal parliament and three members of the cantonal government before shooting himself. It remains the worst such event in the country's modern history, and mass shootings on any scale are uncommon in a nation where firearms are nonetheless common in homes.

Meloni names the woman killed

Meloni identified the woman killed as Maria Spinelli and offered her condolences to the family in a statement posted on X on Sunday evening. She said her thoughts were also with the wounded and with everyone caught up in what she called a dramatic event, and she voiced trust in the Swiss authorities to establish exactly what had happened.

I express my deepest condolences for the death of Maria Spinelli, the young Italian woman who was a victim of the tragic shooting in Aarau, Switzerland

Meloni said she trusted Swiss authorities to shed full light on what happened and to identify those responsible. Her account that two of the wounded were Italian differed from the description police gave on Monday, when the cantonal force said the injured were four Swiss men and a German woman aged between 24 and 31.

Tekibo, a Swiss DJ who performed at the rave, wrote on Instagram that what had happened was heartbreaking. He said techno and raves were meant to be places of freedom and safety, not places where such violence occurs, and added that he had lost an important friend, without saying more.

Police continued to ask anyone who filmed or photographed the racecourse before or during the shooting to hand the material to investigators, saying it could help establish the exact order of events. It was one of several public appeals the force made as it sought accounts from the crowd that had attended the rave and any bystanders nearby.

What remains unresolved

With a suspect in custody, the investigation has turned to the background of the attack and the possible motive, which police say are still being examined. The exact circumstances of the shooting are also unclear, and officers have not described how it unfolded beyond saying shots were fired at a group of people as the rave was breaking up.

Police said the man was arrested on strong suspicion of having committed the crime. They have not released his name, in keeping with Swiss privacy practice, and no charge had been announced as the inquiry continued.

Police said early in the search that they could not tell whether one person or several were responsible, or whether the attacker had fled by car or on foot. Only after the arrest did the force say it assumed a lone perpetrator, and the search that had spanned two countries was wound down.

Investigators have called the case highly unusual for Switzerland. The victims' full identities and the reason for the attack had not been made public, though police said casings recovered at the racecourse pointed to at least two calibres, a handgun or submachine gun alongside a larger weapon such as an assault-type rifle. For now, the arrest is the clearest development in a case that has drawn responses from both Swiss and Italian authorities.