BERLIN—Two police officers were shot dead on a rural road in western Germany while on a routine patrol early Monday, police said. The shooting happened during a traffic check near Kusel at about 4:20 a.m., police in Kaiserslautern said in a statement. The officers radioed that shots were being fired, spokesman Bernhard Christian Erfort told n-tv television. But reinforcements who arrived at the scene were unable to help the 24-year-old woman and 29-year-old man. Erfort said he didn’t know whether the officers had seen something particular about the assailants’ vehicle that they wanted to check or whether it was just a routine check. Police had no description of the perpetrators, the car they used, or what direction they fled in. A manhunt has been extended to the neighboring German state of Saarland, police said. They called on drivers in the Kusel area not to pick up hitchhikers and warned that …