Six people were killed in a shooting and several more injured in a shooting in southwestern Germany, police and local media said on Friday.

The shooter, believed to have a personal motive, launched an assault in the town of Rot am See.

The DPA news agency and Bild newspaper both reported six people had died in the shooting.

A police spokesman in nearby Aalen told AFP that "several" people were wounded and more than one killed but could not confirm reports of six people killed.

A man with a personal connection to the victims had been arrested, the spokesman said.

The Bild newspaper reported that the people killed were all family members of the shooter, adding that the perpetrator was a man born in 1983.

The shooting took place at around 12:45 local time (11:45 GMT) near the train station at Rot am See, a town of 5,200 residents near Heidelberg and located some 135 km (84 miles) southeast of Frankfurt, close to the medieval town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

Mass shootings are a comparatively rare occurrence in Germany, although in October a far-right attacker shot two people dead in eastern city Halle after trying to get into a packed synagogue with home-made weapons.

In July 2016, a teenager used a pistol bought illegally online to kill nine people in a shooting spree at a Munich shopping centre, before turning the weapon on himself.