Police said that incident on Sunday, in which three others were injured, did not bear the hallmarks of a “terrorist attack”. He said it was “a game played by almost every known rampage killer”.
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Meanwhile German police arrested a 16-year old Afghan youth on Sunday on suspicion of a connection with the shootings.
Investigators said they saw an “obvious link” between the killings and white supremacist Anders Breivik’s massacre of 77 people in Norway exactly five years earlier.
A spokesman for the Munich prosecutors’ office has stated that he had spent two months as an inpatient at a mental care facility in 2015 and was afterward treated as an outpatient.
Ansbach deputy police chief Roman Fertinger said there were “indications” that pieces of metal had been added to the explosive device.
Notwithstanding Germany’s already strict gun laws [the US Library of Congress describes them as being among the most stringent in Europe], the country’s Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that he planned to review German gun laws after the attack and seek improvement where needed, as it was not understood how the shooter gained access to the gun he used.
The shooter said he had no choice but to get a gun and that it wasn’t his fault.
Police believed it was an older weapon that had been reassembled, and were still working to establish where the attacker had obtained the 300 rounds of ammunition found in his rucksack.
Officials said the 18-year-old was an avid player of violent video games who purchased his weapon on the so called dark web. A 20-year-old and a 45-year-old were also killed.
The crime office told a news conference that the victims of the attack had not been specifically targeted and were not classmates of the gunman. Three were from Kosovo, three from Turkey and one from Greece.
Another of the victims was also a Greek citizen, Greece’s Foreign Ministry said Saturday.
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The shooting shook Europe after a spate of recent terror attacks on the continent, including the stabbing of passengers on a German train by a man who claimed to be inspired by ISIS and the killing of 84 people in a truck attack in Nice, France.
