Bavarian official Robert Heimberger said evidence found at the home of the shooter, who turned the gun on himself after the attack, showed he was an avid player of first-person shooter games.
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David Ali Sonboly, 18, began the planning after visiting the scene of a 2009 school shooting in the German town of Winnenden, a Bavarian official said, Xinhua news agency reported.
The 16-year-old Afghan youth has been arrested for possibly having failed to report the plans of the gunman, according to a police statement issued on Sunday.
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.
Sonboly had spent two months at an inpatient facility in 2015 and was treated afterward as an outpatient, Steinkraus-Koch said.
The gunman was also evidently inspired by Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik, and likely deliberately staged the shooting on the fifth anniversary of Breivik’s massacre of 77 people, Heimberger said.
Senior German politicians have called for tighter gun control.
Police have not named the attacker, but said he had dual German and Iranian nationalities and was born and raised in Munich.
However, he was allegedly depressed and was under psychiatric treatment, which fits with the other findings of the crime, according to the investigators.
That attack came after a refugee from Pakistan wielding an axe injured five people near Wuerzbuerg, also in southern Germany, before he was shot dead by police on July 18. The others were 20 and 45, the police chief said.
The teenager apparently tried to lure his victims to a McDonald’s restaurant, the initial site of the shooting, with a freaky message on a hacked Facebook page, promising free meals to anyone at the venue at 4pm.
Police and prosecutors told a press briefing today the seeds for the deadly shooting spree may have been sowed four years ago when Sonboly was beaten up at school.
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.
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Seven of his victims were themselves teenagers: three were 14 years old, two were 15, one was 17 and one 19. “Suddenly I heard shots”, said Ferdinand Bozorgzad, who lives in a high-rise building next to the Olympic Shopping Center mall.
