The teenager who shot dead nine people at a Munich shopping mall spent a year planning the rampage but selected his victims at random, officials said on July 24.
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German police have arrested the 16 year old Afghani boy as they suspect he knew Ali David Sonboly was planning the fatal attack and did not report it.
Police said Sonboly was obsessed with mass shootings, even visiting a site of a school shooting in the German town of Winnenden and taking photographs past year.
Steinkraus-Koch told the new conference, “This (WhatsApp) chat and questioning of a suspect has shown that the Afghan met the gunman directly before the gun attack at what was later the scene of the crime”.
He added that the victims had not been specifically targetted and were not classmates of the gunman.
Police have been probing claims that the killer felt bullied by his peers and that he may have been inspired by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people exactly five years before the Munich shootings.
Mr Heimberger said the McDonald’s restaurant where most of the victims died was a hangout for youths of immigrant backgrounds, and the dead included victims of Hungarian, Turkish, Greek, and Kosovo Albanian backgrounds, as well as a stateless person.
There’s also word that the gunman received psychiatric treatment a year ago.
The father of the 18-year-old man who perpetrated the shooting attack alerted the police after recognising his son in one of the first videos that began circulating the internet shortly after the massacre.
The statement said the Afghan youth was also being investigated for his role in a Facebook posting that invited people to a meeting at a cinema near the Munich central train station, but it gave no further details.
Officials said photographs found on the gunman’s camera showed he had also visited the German town of Winnenden, the site of a deadly 2009 school shooting.
A Syrian migrant set off an explosion at a bar in southern Germany that killed himself and wounded a dozen others, authorities said, the third attack to hit Bavaria in a week.
Police chief Andrae said all the fatalities were from Munich and the surrounding area.
Hundreds of people, many of them in tears, gathered outside the Munich shopping centre where the attack took place to pay tribute to the victims on Sunday.
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Numerous victims were young people, and the 18-year-old high school student wounded 27 others during his rampage before turning the gun on himself.
