AARAU. The manhunt that began with shots at the Aarauer Rave in the early hours of Sunday is over. Aargau cantonal police arrested a 43 year old Swiss man shortly before 1am on Monday, detaining him on what they called strong suspicion of carrying out the attack that killed a 22 year old Italian woman and left five people in hospital.
The arrest came less than 23 hours after the first emergency call from the Schachen racetrack, and after a search that at its peak involved virtually the entire cantonal force, units from neighbouring cantons, the Argus special operations unit, an army helicopter and German federal police watching the motorway corridors north of the border. Police did not say where the suspect was detained.
“Investigations into the exact circumstances of the incident, as well as its background and possible motive, are currently underway,” the cantonal police said in a statement. “At this stage, it is assumed that a single perpetrator was involved.” On Sunday, investigators were still working on three scenarios: a mass shooting, an act of terrorism, or a settling of scores in the criminal milieu. None has been formally excluded.
The woman who died at the scene has been named as Maria Spinelli, a 22 year old Italian citizen resident in Switzerland. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni made her name public on Sunday evening, offered her government’s support to the family and said she was confident the Swiss authorities would shed full light on what happened. Italy’s foreign ministry is sending officials to Zurich to follow the investigation, and two of the five wounded are also Italian citizens.
The injured, four men and a woman aged between 24 and 27, were taken to hospital with wounds ranging from minor to severe. Cantonal police have not updated their condition since Sunday, citing the privacy of the families.
The forensic picture helped drive the search. Casings recovered at the racetrack came from two types of weapon, a pistol and a larger firearm, possibly an assault rifle. That finding kept open the possibility of more than one shooter through Sunday, and investigators will now test the suspect against the ballistic evidence, the witness statements and the video material uploaded by attendees.
The shots were fired at around 2.30am on Sunday, as the Aarauer Rave VOL. 7, billed by its organisers as the canton’s largest one-day gathering of its kind, was winding down at the covered horse racing track in the Schachen district. Around 3,500 people had been expected, and police believe at least 100 were still on the site when the shooting began. Several witnesses said they first mistook the shots for fireworks.
The arrest brought the first public closure to an operation that had emptied Aarau’s streets of everything but police vehicles for a day. The town of around 22,000, half an hour west of Zurich, had not seen a deployment on this scale in years.
Political reaction ran ahead of the facts, as it tends to. Guy Parmelin, who holds the rotating Swiss presidency this year, offered his condolences to the victim’s family on Sunday. The organisers said they were shocked and heartbroken, and cancelled all remaining events.
Switzerland has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in Europe, fed by the militia army’s tradition of keeping service weapons at home, and one of the lowest rates of gun homicide. Mass shootings are rare enough that the reference case remains Zug in 2001, when a gunman killed 14 people in the cantonal parliament before taking his own life. Tighter rules on acquisition and storage were introduced in 2019.
What happens next follows the cantonal code of criminal procedure. The suspect will be questioned by Aargau prosecutors, who must bring him before a detention judge within days if they seek to hold him. A press conference is expected once the first interrogations are complete.
The cordon around the Schachen racetrack, the swimming pool and the sports grounds remained in place on Monday while forensic teams finished their work in daylight. For the investigators, the arrest closes the manhunt and opens the harder file: who the man is, how he came to carry two weapons into a party, and why.