Police have arrested a 16-year-old on suspicion of knowing about the Munich shooting spree carried out by deranged loner Ali Sonly and failing to report it.
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Robert Heimberger, head of Bavaria’s criminal police, said the gunman had been planning the attack since he paid a visit past year to the town of Winnenden – the scene of a previous school shooting in 2009 – and took photographs.
Munich police chief Hubertus Andrae said the link between Breivik and the Munich shooting is “obvious”, the BBC reported.
But Thomas Steinkraus-Koch, spokesperson for the Munich prosecutors’ office, said initial evidence had not indicated any kind of political motivation for Sonboly’s attack. Medication was found at the teen’s home, but investigators don’t know yet whether he had been taking it, Steinkraus-Koch added.
Most of the nine killed were teenagers.
Police commandos, with night vision equipment and dogs, raided an apartment in the Munich neighbourhood of Maxvorstadt early on Saturday, where a neighbour said the gunman had lived with his parents for about four years.
He said it was likely the Glock pistol – which had been reactivated – was bought on the “dark net” market, an area accessible only with the use of special software.
Munich police witnessed the suicide at 8:30 p.m. local time (1830 GMT), said the police.
Officials said Sonboly was not known to them and he had no criminal record.
Police said Sonboly posed as a teenage girl on a fake Facebook account to lure victims to a shopping mall and McDonalds, where he gunned them down.
He said Europe was also debating new weapons guidelines that were up for discussion.
Mr Heimberger said he could not reveal details of the document yet because there are “many more terabytes” of information to evaluate, but described the gunman as a “devoted player” of group internet “killer games”, pitting virtual shooters against each other.
The blast is the third incident to hit the southern German state of Bavaria in a week, after nine were killed in a shooting rampage in Munich and several were wounded in an axe attack on a train.
“We must continue to do all we can to limit and strictly control access to deadly weapons”, German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, leader of the centre-left Social Democrats, told German media. A 20-year-old and a 45-year-old were also killed.
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“Nine people who were going shopping on the Friday evening, or wanted to eat something, they are now dead – it seems according to the investigations, hit and killed by the bullets of one single perpetrator”.
