A security guard employed by the German railway company Deutsche Bahn suffered life-threatening injuries after falling from a moving train during a violent confrontation with a passenger, police and prosecutors announced.

The incident occurred Friday evening during a ticket inspection on a train traveling from Offenburg to Karlsruhe in southwestern Germany.

According to a statement released early Saturday morning, a verbal dispute apparently broke out during the ticket check, prompting the intervention of two security personnel from Deutsche Bahn.

It is suspected that a passenger, believed to be under the influence of alcohol, insulted the two security men. The situation then escalated into a physical altercation between the passenger (36 years old) and one of the security officers (26 years old).

Both men fell to the train floor during the scuffle. Subsequently, one of the train doors opened for reasons still unknown, causing the security guard to fall out of the moving train near Ettlingen-Bruchhausen, according to police and prosecutors.

It remains unclear how fast the train was traveling at the time of the incident.

The suspect was arrested while still on the train.

The security guard was eventually found with life-threatening injuries alongside the tracks after an extensive search, about two kilometers from where the train later stopped. He was taken to a hospital for treatment.

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No further information on his condition was available overnight.

Police are investigating the circumstances of the incident and the exact sequence of events. The train was taken out of service pending the investigation.

The incident brought to mind a case where a ticket inspector was beaten to death by a man without a ticket in early February in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, after being asked to leave the train during a ticket check.

Last week, the 26-year-old offender was sentenced to ten years in prison after being convicted of causing death by physical assault. He had dealt violent punches to the ticket inspector's head, causing a brain hemorrhage from which he later died.

The crime sparked widespread shock across Germany and triggered a debate about security on trains. For many train inspectors, the incident took on painful significance amid rising attacks on railway employees.

According to German government data, the Federal Police recorded around 2,690 attacks on Deutsche Bahn employees in 2025, an increase of about 11% compared to the previous year.