Munich’s long night of fear

Across the city, scenes of panic ran into the early hours of the morning.

Officials suspect things began when gunman Ali David Sonboly hacked into a young woman’s Facebook account. Picture: Johannes Simon/Getty Images.

Around 8:30pm (local time) in Munich on Friday, officers on patrol called out to a suspicious man just north of the popular Olympic Shopping Center.

In response, police said, the man pulled out a 9mm Glock handgun, held it to his head and pulled the trigger.

It was the end of a German nightmare, a big-city shooting spree that touched off fears of the sort of wideranging terror attack this country had long been spared.

But the fear wasn’t over: past midnight, SWAT teams were still crisscrossing a city on lockdown, responding to emergency calls coming in at a rate of 12 a minute. “Don’t help the attackers!!!” the police posted on Twitter shortly before the gunman’s suicide, pleading with the public not to share images of police activity.

It was a night that brought to the surface Germans’ nervousness about the recent spate of terrorist attacks across Europe.

Across the city, there were scenes of panic as police warned that as many as three attackers were still on the run. Public transit stood still, people huddled in restaurants and public buildings, and police said the national railway company was providing train cars as shelters for stranded people. “If you think about what has happened in Europe in recent weeks, then it is justified to speak of the worst-case scenario,” police spokesman Marcus da Gloria Martins told reporters Friday night as events were unfolding, explaining why police were treating the incident as a terrorist attack. This chronology of events reflects the latest police account of the night, a timeline that continued to evolve Saturday as officials reported new findings.

Things began, officials suspect, when gunman Ali David Sonboly hacked into a young woman’s Facebook account. Around 3pm local time on Friday, a post on the account invited friends to a local McDonald’s later that day: “I’ll buy you something if you want but not too expensive.” Police didn’t say if anyone heeded that call. But less than three hours later, around 5.50pm, Sonboly opened fire in the McDonald’s, leaving seven teens and two adults dead inside the restaurant, on the street and in the shopping mall nearby.

Sonboly fled to the roof of a parking garage, where he was shot at by plainclothes officers and got into a shouting match with a person filming him. “I’m German!” the shooter at one point appears to call out as the bystander harangues him, using an ethnic slur.

Then Sonboly disappeared, after the plainclothes officers gave chase cautiously so as not to risk getting shot themselves.

Meanwhile, Munich police had activated their terror-response plan. Germany’s elite GSG 9 tactical police unit — formed in response to the killings of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, which were held near the scene of Friday’s shooting — flew in as part of the 2,300 officers deployed to stop the violence.

Two other special police units around the country were put on alert but not sent to Munich in case they were needed elsewhere.

“Given the conceivable terrorism situation, it was necessary and desirable to be able to deploy outside Munich as well,” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said.

Officials feared the incident could be much bigger than a lone-wolf attack.

Scared bystanders had sped away from the scene in their cars, causing authorities initially to suspect they may have been accomplices.

On surveillance cameras, the plainclothes officers who shot at the gunman couldn’t immediately be identified as members of the police. “As long as we don’t know where the suspect or suspects are, we can’t let our guard down or let up in our efforts,” Mr Martins, the police spokesman, told reporters nearly six hours after the attack began.

The central train station was evacuated, and police urged drivers to keep the streets and highways clear for emergency vehicles.

The US State Department urged Americans in Munich to “shelter in place.” The Münchner Ratskeller restaurant, inside City Hall, absorbed some 300 people from Munich’s Marienplatz Square as police searched the area.

They were only allowed to leave at 10pm.

In the confusion, stranded people pleaded on Twitter to be offered shelter by anyone. Others took refuge in hospitals, while the city’s mosques opened their doors.

“Police wanted people off the street while searching all subway entrances and exits. They even took people out of subway cars,” said Ratskeller manager Peter Wieser. “We had many guests from abroad, from Asia and the Middle East, who didn’t know what was happening.”

The sense of fear, police said, was so great that 4,310 emergency calls came in the space of six hours, four times the average daily total.

Only after police confirmed that the other shooters seen in video footage were actually police officers, and that the cars speeding away from the scene were benign, did officials sound the all-clear. It was 1.26am.

An hour later, Munich Police Chief Hubertus Andrä faced the news media. It had been the most difficult night in his three years in the post, he said. He sought to calm a city and country that has been unsettled by the influx of more than a million refugees and migrants into Germany since early last year, many of whom came through Munich’s Central Station.

“The events of last evening and tonight make us sad and speechless,” Chief Andrä said.

At a news conference the next morning, he said: “This act and this suspect have absolutely no connection to the refugee issue.”

Overnight, SWAT teams raided the apartment where Sonboly had lived with his parents and younger brother. Inside, investigators found evidence that the shooter had been obsessed with mass shootings but not terrorism.

At the scene of the shooting, police officers and other officials consoled friends and relatives of the victims at a KFC restaurant late into the night. At least a dozen people huddled inside, while more stood on the parking lot, their sobs audible from the street.

“There were children and teenagers that are dead,” said the restaurant’s manager, who was pacing outside. “Why do people do such things?”

--Christopher Alessi in Munich and Ulrike Dauer in Frankfurt contributed to this article.

Dow Jones newswires