Munich shooter was bullied loner, planned attack for a year

Robert Heimberger, head of Bavaria’s criminal police, said Sonboly had paid a visit past year to the town of Winnenden – the scene of a previous school shooting in 2009 – and took photographs.

The 18-year-old, identified only as David S., “received inpatient treatment in 2015 for two months and after that received outpatient care”, said Thomas Steinkraus-Koch.

Senior German politicians have called for tighter controls on the sale of guns in the wake of the shooting at the Olympia shopping centre.

Sonboly, a Iranian-German teen, was “derranged” and “obsessed” with mass shootings but had no political motivation behind the attack, police said. But none of those killed were known to him, investigators said.

“Preliminary indications suggest that he was interested in that incident” and visited the site a year ago and took photos, said Mr. Heimberger.

The 18-year-old gunman who killed nine people in a shooting spree in Munich had been planning his crime for a year but chose his victims at random, officials said.

Heimberger said there were “many more terabytes” of information to evaluate, and that the teenager’s brother and parents were still not emotionally up to being interrogated by police.

Weapons are strictly controlled in Germany and police are still trying to determine exactly how the shooter obtained the Glock 17 used in the attack.

“There is a suspicion that the 16-year-old is a possible tacit accomplice to (Friday’s) attack”, the police said.

Further details were not immediately available late Sunday, but Germany’s dpa news agency reported that the 16-year-old boy had gone to police himself after the deadly rampage.

Officials believe there likely was significance in the timing of the attack, which came five years to the day since Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, many of them attendees at a youth camp.

The shooter’s father saw a video of the start of his son’s rampage on social media and went to police as it was taking place, Heimberger said, adding that the family was still emotionally not up to questioning by police.

The gunman had lured people to the McDonald’s restaurant, where the shooting began on Friday, using a fake Facebook page he had created in May.