Neighbors identified the culprit as 18-year-old Ali Sonboly, a German-Iranian student, who they described as intelligent and shy.
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For the social media-addicted teenagers living in the area – a low income, working class area with a high immigrant population – the offer was too tempting. The youngest was just 13.
Three victims were from Kosovo, three from Turkey and one from Greece.
The shooting rampage took place at the Olympia shopping mall, one of Munich’s biggest, and at an adjacent McDonald’s at around 5:50pm local time on Friday.
“One of the other neighbours told me he had psychological problems”, a local said, “but I never saw any evidence of it myself”. “We share in your grief, we think of you and are suffering with you.”.
The German leader also said the country’s security services would do everything to ensure the public was safe, saying the federal police would lend its support to the Bavarian police. What made the Munich tragedy even harder to bear, said Ms Merkel, was that it had come hot on the heels of other horrors.
Breivik murdered 77 people in Norway on 22 July 2011, killing eight with a bomb in the capital Oslo before shooting dead 69 at a summer camp for young centre-left political activists on the island of Utoeya. The gunman himself was the tenth death, his body found about a kilometre away from the shopping centre with a single gunshot wound to the head.
Sonboly, who had reportedly battled depression, was born to Iranian parents who came to Germany as asylum-seekers in the 1990s. Though he had been raised a Shiite and flirted with Christianity, he had no religious affiliation.
Police found piles of reading material about that outrage when they stormed his home. Sonboly was receiving psychiatric treatment for several mental disorders, including depression, according to prosecutors. Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said authorities were checking reports the teen may have been bullied by his peers. A video shot of Sonboly also showed him yelling anti-foreigner slurs. Mr Salbey, a 57-year-old digger driver, had a heated and abusive exchange with Sonboly.
Monica Raduvanov was at the Munich McDonald’s where the first shots fell. “Bam bam, that’s what it sounded like”, he said. Then I saw two people lying there. It is directly underneath our house. “I see he is killing the children; the children are sitting down to eat, so they can’t run, and he starts killing them”. The killer had written: “You can talk to me at McDonald’s”. According to Mr Salbey, the youth then fired in his direction and walked off. Mr Salbey’s video has gone viral. At about 5.50pm, he burst out of the fast-food restaurant’s toilet with firing his pistol. He carried out the attack with a 9mm Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol, which he later used to… The gun Sonboly used was illegal, with the serial number removed.
“The lad was very, very nice”, said one.
“I heard he was bullied at school”, said Safete Dalipi, 14, who lives in the same apartment building.
They have yet to be interviewed by police “because of their state – they also lost their son”, said the Munich prosecutor.
Police had declared an emergency situation and launched a major manhunt in Munich city soon after the incident, as eyewitness statements claimed three assailants with long guns were involved in the attack.
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Sadly no words could explain such a senseless attack. The killer from the shopping centre, meanwhile, was said to be on the loose in the U-Bahn underground network. He still had 300 rounds of ammunition in his rucksack.
