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Germany mourns the victims of Munich massacre

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.

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Officials said the 18-year-old was an avid player of violent video games who purchased his weapon on the so called dark web.

With parts of the crime scene now cleared and released – police said it was too soon to say as to when the Olympic shopping centre would re-open.

The pistol-wielding attacker, identified by Munich Police Chief Hubertus Andrae as a citizen of both Germany and Iran, was later found dead of a suspected self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Andrae said it was premature to say whether the Friday incident was a terrorist attack or the work of a deranged person.

The suspect received both inpatient and outpatient psychiatric treatment past year to help him deal with “fears of contact with others”, Mr Steinkraus-Koch added.

Police have not named the attacker, but said he had dual German and Iranian nationality, and was born and raised in Munich. An official of the state prosecutor’s office said the shooting victims did not include any classmates of the gunman.

This line of inquiry still needs to be verified, he added. Breivik killed 77 people, first by exploding a bomb in a van and then by stalking his victims with a gun at a summer camp.

Sonboly apparently tried to lure his victims to the sight of the massacre with a freakish message on a hacked Facebook page, promising free meals to anyone at the restaurant at 4pm.

Chancellor Angela Merkel (pictured immediately below) said Munich had suffered a “night of horror”.

MUNICH (AP) – Bavaria’s top security official on Sunday urged a constitutional change to allow the country’s military to be able to be deployed in support of police during attacks like Friday night’s deadly rampage at a Munich mall, while Germany’s vice chancellor proposed even stricter controls on firearms. “They are even more hard to bear because we have had so many different and hard reports of horrors in the past few days”. German radio station Bayerischer Rundfunk said the shooter had a red backpack similar to the one used by a gunman seen at a McDonald’s restaurant where the attack reportedly began.

Friday’s shooting in Munich – the third mass attack in Europe since the Bastille Day truck carnage in Nice, France, nine days ago – took place on the fifth anniversary of Breivik’s attacks in Oslo and on the island of Utoya.

Sonboly had no criminal record.

De Maiziere said there were indications the killer had been bullied “by others his age”.

A police patrol had shot and wounded the gunman but he managed to escape, he said.

Investigators looking into Friday’s mass shooting in Munich say the gunman spent more than a year preparing his attack.

Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said there were several signs he had been suffering from “not insignificant psychological troubles”.

They included three 14-year-olds, two 15-year-olds, and four others aged 17, 19, 20 and 45.

German politicians have called for tighter controls on the sale of arms in the wake of the shooting.

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“The investigation is still trying to determine where it came from”, Heimberger said, adding that the assailant was not the registered owner of the gun. “Only God knows what happened”, Telfije Dalipi, a 40-year-old Macedonian neighbour, told Reuters. “… I have no idea if he did anything bad elsewhere”.

Ali David Sonboly was obsessed with mass shootings