One question facing authorities investigating Friday’s attack is whether Sonboly, who was bullied and isolated at school, intentionally set out to kill other young people.
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German prosecutors said the shooter acquired the semi-automatic pistol he used in the killings on the dark web, which can only be accessed via special software.
In a separate development in the southern German city of Ansbach on Sunday, police said a man was killed when an explosive device he was believed to be carrying went off near an open-air music festival, injuring 10 people.
Heimberger, head of Bavaria’s criminal police, also said that the victims of the attack had not been specifically targeted and were not classmates of the gunman.
However, he appeared to have planned the assault with chilling precision, with Bavarian police chief Robert Heimberger telling a press conference yesterday that Sonboly had visited the site and taken photos during a year of preparation.
Mr Steinkraus-Koch said Sonboly spent two months in a closed psychiatric ward in 2015 and received treatment for “social phobias” and anxiety.
There is so far no evidence that he knew any of his victims, or that there was any political motivation behind the attack, said Thomas Steinkraus-Koch, a spokesman for the Munich prosecutors’ office.
Police said they caught the unnamed teen late Sunday and investigators were able to retrieve a deleted chat between him and the German-Iranian attacker on the messaging app WhatsApp.
Earlier, officials said they found in the gunman’s belongings numerous documents on mass killings, including a book entitled “Rampage in My Mind – Why Students Kill”.
It was also determined that there were no other attacks besides the one that took place at the McDonald’s.
A statement on Munich police’s Facebook page says: “There is a suspicion that the 16-year-old is a possible tacit accomplice to the attack”. It was a pistol that had been rendered unusable and sold as a prop, then was restored to a fully functioning state.
Sonboly once described the 17-year-old killer in the 2009 attack as a good person, according to a 16-year-old youth with whom he played video games in an online club, the German magazine Spiegel reported.
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Its serial numbers were filed off and he had no permit to purchase weapons, authorities have said.
