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.
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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.
A motorist knocked down the attacker soon afterward and he was then taken into custody by police, the witness told Bid.
Officials said he had been a victim of bullying who suffered from panic attacks set off by contact with other people.
The deranged youth also had a history of mental illness, receiving two months of inpatient care at a psychiatric facility in 2015, according to Steinkraus-Koch.
Medication was found at his parents’ home in Munich’s Maxvorstadt district, but it is unclear whether or not he had been taking it.
Mourners outside the shopping centre that was on Friday the scene of a devastating shooting that killed nine people.
None of the bullies were among his victims, however, and none of those killed were known to him.
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.
His parents are “too shocked to help with the investigation” at this time, police said.
“It is not the case that he deliberately selected” the people who he shot, he said.
The gunman, a high-school student from Munich with Iranian and German citizenship, also wounded more than two dozen others on Friday night before turning his illegal Glock 17 pistol on himself.
German President Joachim Gauck said he was “horrified” by the “murderous attack”, while Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, who was on a flight to NY when the shooting began, will return to Germany.
At 4pm he posted a message from a fake Facebook account offering free food to people who came to the McDonald’s near the mall.
The shooter, identified only as David S., visited the site of a previous school shooting in the German town of Winnenden and took photographs, Bavarian investigator Robert Heimberger said. It was a pistol that had been rendered unusable and sold as a prop, then was restored to a fully functioning state.
He said Sonboly was a keen player of “first-person shooter” video games. Three were from Kosovo, three from Turkey and one from Greece.
Mr Gabriel said German authorities are investigating how the German-Iranian dual national had gained access to a weapon despite signs that he had significant psychological issues.
Iran has strongly condemned a Friday shooting spree at a shopping center in Munich, urging global consensus towards fighting terrorism.
German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, also a member of Merkel’s Democrats, told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper in a separate interview that he planned to review German gun laws after the attack, and seek improvements where needed.
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Following a police search of the attacker’s room, where a book on teenage shooting sprees was discovered, Munich police chief Hubertus Andrae all but ruled out link to any militant group. In May, a mentally unstable 27-year-old man carried out a knife attack on a regional train in Bavaria, killing one person and injuring three others.
