‘Acute terror’: gunman in Munich shooting rampage
Teenage gunman Ali David Sonboly, who killed nine in a Munich mall rampage, had material about shooting sprees in his room.
The gunman who killed nine people in a shooting spree in Munich was a school student born and raised in the city who was believed to have been in psychiatric care and had taken an intense interest in mass shootings, officials said.
Police said 10 of those injured were in a critical condition, including a 13-year-old boy.
The gunman, who shot himself and became the tenth fatality, was identified by an official on Saturday as Ali David Sonboly, an 18-year-old German-Iranian dual citizen.
Officials had earlier said they were considering all possible motives for the attack that occurred on Friday local time, but Munich police chief Hubertus Andrae said on Saturday that there were no indications that the gunman had any connection with Islamic State following a search of his bedroom.
Rather, the search showed Sonboly had taken a deep interest in gun violence, and officials speculated that the fifth anniversary of a massacre in Norway the same day had motivated the attack.
“Documents were found dealing with shooting sprees,” Mr Andrae said. “The attacker apparently occupied himself intensively with this.”
Among the documents was a German-language version of the book Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters, according to Robert Heimberger, the head of the state criminal investigations agency.
The attacker opened fire in and around a shopping mall before fleeing and setting off a manhunt that lasted several hours. About 1am local time Saturday, police said the gunman was dead.
The overnight investigation had made it clear that the shooter, armed with a Glock pistol and more than 300 rounds of ammunition, had acted alone before killing himself, officials said.
Mr Andrae also said the shooting had “no connection at all to the refugee issue”. Germany has been on edge since a teenage migrant who had registered himself as an Afghan refugee attacked train passengers with an axe on Monday, injuring five.
“We suspect terrorism,” a police spokesman in the Bavarian capital said earlier, but authorities said even then there were no indication of an Islamist link.
Police gave a “cautious all clear” in the pre-dawn hours, more than seven hours after the attack began and brought much of the city to a standstill as all public transit systems were shut down amid a massive manhunt.
Witnesses had reported seeing three men with firearms near the Olympia Einkaufszentrum mall, but Mr Andrae said two other people who fled the area quickly were investigated but had “nothing to do with the incident”.
A video posted on social media appeared to show a man dressed in black walking away from a McDonald’s restaurant while firing repeatedly on people as they fled screaming.
In the wake of the attacks, German leaders sought to calm public fears. Friday’s shooting ushered in a night of panic in Munich as false rumours of additional shootings raced over social media.
The police emergency number received 4310 calls in the space of six hours on Friday night — roughly four times an average day’s total. Authorities had warned, based on witness reports, that additional gunmen may have been on the loose.
“We cannot allow insecurity and fear to win the upper hand over our lives,” Bavarian State Premier Horst Seehofer said on Saturday. “We must continue living our lives and living our values.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Munich had been through “an evening and a night of horror”. She said she understood Germans’ anxiety about their security — both in the wake of the Afghan’s train assault and last week’s truck attack in Nice, France, that killed 84.
“I can understand anyone who today approaches a crowd of people with trepidation, asking in the back of his head whether he is safe,” Ms Merkel said. She added later: “The state and the security agencies will continue to do everything to protect the freedom and the security of people in Germany.”
Officials said the shooter might have hacked a Facebook page to lure victims to the McDonald’s restaurant where the shooting started.
The post on a Facebook page appearing to belong to a young woman invited people to the restaurant, saying, “I’ll buy you what you want as long as it’s not too expensive.”
“There are many indications that this was set up by the attacker,” Mr Heimberger, the head of the state criminal investigations agency.
Officials said that Friday’s fifth anniversary of the killing of 77 people by right-wing extremist Anders Breivik in Norway might have motivated the shooting.
They noted the apparent targeting of youths in both attacks. In the shootings on Friday, seven of the nine dead were teenagers, including three 14-year-olds, he said.
“You don’t have to look into a crystal ball to see there are similarities between the two,” Mr Andrae said.
Sonboly lived with his family in a well-kept, middle-class neighbourhood near the centre of Munich. The family has an apartment in a recently built eight-storey building facing onto Dachauer Strasse, one of Munich’s busiest streets.
In the ground floor is a cafe-grocery store specialising in American and other foreign products. Next door is a Maserati dealership.
Munich’s main university is nearby, making the area popular with students. Some of the city’s largest museums aren’t far away.
He was a loner who preferred violent video games such as “Grand Theft Auto” to socialising, according to two young neighbours who said they were very close to his younger brother.
The Facebook posting, sent from a young woman’s account, urged people to come to the mall at 4pm local time, saying: “I’ll give you something if you want, but not too expensive.”
Mr Heimberger said “it appears it was prepared by the suspect and then sent out”. The woman shortly after reported that her account had been hacked.
Investigators found material on mass shootings in the gunman’s room, Mr Andrae said.
Police said they have so far been unable to interview the gunman’s parents because of their current distressed state.
The mayor of Munich has declared a day of mourning for the victims of Friday’s shooting in the Bavarian capital.
Mayor Dieter Reiter says the city is “shocked and aghast at this terrible act.” In a statement on Saturday on Facebook, Mr Reiter expressed his condolences to the victims, their family and friends, and thanked security forces for their work.
“These are difficult hours for Munich,” he said, adding that the city’s citizens had shown great solidarity toward each other. “Our city stands united.”
Peter Beck, a Munich police spokesman, said officers were still collecting evidence at the scene of the crime on Saturday morning local time. “With regard to the suspect we have to examine everything, but we don’t know yet what triggered the crime,” Mr Beck told AP.
The third attack on civilians in Europe in barely a week saw panicked shoppers fleeing the Olympia mall as elite police launched a massive operation to track down what had initially been thought to be up to three assailants.
“We found a man who killed himself. We assume that he was the only shooter,” police said on Twitter.
Iran on Saturday condemned the shooting spree. Foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi denounced “the killing of innocent and defenceless people” and expressed Iran’s solidarity with the German government and people, the official IRNA news agency reported.
Mr Ghasemi also called for a “relentless and comprehensive fight” to eradicate violence.
Mr Andrae said the gunman had dual citizenship and “no criminal record”.
He said the body of the shooter was found about 2-1/2 hours after the attack, about 1km away from the shopping centre. He died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Nine people, including youths and children, were killed in the shooting that began early on Friday evening local time.
Twenty-one people were injured in the rampage.
Witness Luan Zequiri said he was in the mall when the shooting began and “there was a really loud scream,” he told German broadcaster n-tv.
He said he saw only one attacker, who yelled an anti-foreigner slur and was wearing jack boots and a backpack.
“I looked in his direction and he shot two people on the stairs,” Zequiri said. He said he hid in a shop, then ran outside when the coast was clear and saw bodies of the dead and wounded on the ground.
Germany has so far escaped the kind of large-scale jihadist attacks seen in neighbouring France and neither the motives nor the identity of the supposed gunman were known.
Munich’s main train station was evacuated and metro and bus transport in the city suspended for several hours while residents were ordered to stay in their homes, leaving the streets largely deserted.
Video obtained by The Associated Press from German news agency NonstopNews showed two bodies with sheets draped over them not far from a McDonald’s across from the mall.
Another video appeared to show a gunman on the roof of a parking garage as he exchanged insults with people who referred to him a foreigner.
“I’m German, I was born here,” the gunman is heard to reply.
One witness to the attack said children were deliberately targeted.
Witness Lauraetta Januze was with her son was in the bathroom of McDonalds, where its believed the attacker began his deadly assault, she told CNN.
“That’s where he loaded his weapon,’’ Ms Januze said.
“Boom, boom, boom, I heard, and then I saw all the injured. I was back to back with him, I was in the bathroom with my kid, and I only saw him shoot directly into the faces of children.”
Another witness who works at the shopping centre, Lynn Stein also reported hearing several shots being fire and people were immediately confused and began to run outside.
“Then there were more shots. People came outside and more ran. People were running and screaming. Later I heard more shots at the parking lot.”
But Ms Stein then went back inside to check on her fellow workers and a man told her the shooter was downstairs. She said she was one person lying on the floor presumably dead or badly hurt.
Europe has been on alert for terrorism in the wake of a string of attacks in neighbouring France and Belgium claimed by the Islamic State jihadist group.
German President Joachim Gauck said he was “horrified” by the “murderous attack”, while Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, who was on a flight to New York when the shooting began, will return to Germany.
US President Barack Obama and French counterpart Francois Hollande voiced staunch support for their close ally.
“Our hearts go out to those who may have been injured. It’s still an active situation, and Germany’s one of our closest allies, so we are going to pledge all the support that they may need in dealing with these circumstances,” Mr Obama said.
Austria said it has “significantly” tightened security measures in states sharing a border with Germany and put its elite Cobra police force on high alert.
The Munich mall is located near the stadium for the 1972 Olympics and the athletes’ village which was the site of the hostage-taking and massacre of Israeli athletes by the Palestinian Black September group during the Games.
The train rampage triggered calls by politicians in Bavaria to impose an upper limit on the number of refugees coming into Germany — many of them via the southern state.
A record 1.1 million migrants and refugees were let in to Germany last year, with Syrians making up the largest group followed by Afghans.
The mall shooting came just eight days after 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel used a truck to mow down 84 people, including children, in the French Riviera city of Nice.
It was the third major attack on French soil in the past 18 months. In March, IS claimed suicide bombings at Brussels airport and a city metro station that left 32 people dead.
In May, a mentally unstable 27-year-old man carried out a knife attack on a regional train in Bavaria, killing one person and injuring three others.
The Wall Street Journal, AFP, AP
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