But police said they had found the body of the assailant about half a mile away and he appeared to have acted alone.
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More than 20 people were injured, three critically, police added.
(Andreas Gebert/dpa via AP).
Policemen arrive at a shopping centre in which a shooting was reported in Munich, southern Germany, on Friday, July 22, 2016.
An official at the shopping center declined comment, saying only, “We are experiencing a problem”, the BBC reported.
A police patrol had shot and wounded the gunman but he managed to escape, he said.
Andrae said the attacker had shouted out during his spree, without elaborating, while some media suggested it was a jihadist slogan.
A record 1.1 million migrants and refugees were let in to Germany previous year, with Syrians making up the largest group followed by Afghans.
The attacker was likely to have acted alone.
Police have confirmed they are treating the shooting as a suspected terrorist attack.
The Czech Republic’s interior minister, Milan Chovanec, had told local television that the country’s border was reinforced in case the Munich attacker or attackers tried to flee, German broadcaster NTV reported.
Twenty-one people were injured in the rampage, 16 of whom were still being treated in hospital.
Retail industry experts also said that at this point big iconic brands don’t appear to be the targets – it’s just that many of them happen to be at public places that are vulnerable to attacks.
Chancellor Angela Merkel will convene her security council on Saturday to address the deadly rampage in the European economic powerhouse which took in more than one million migrants and refugees a year ago.
According to locals, the shopping mall is located near the Hasenbergl district, an area densely-populated with immigrants. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.
While police did not identify the shooter, they said it was an 18-year-old German-Iranian who had lived in Munich for at least two years.
He said it was too early to label the attack an act of terrorism, though police had used the term earlier to describe the nature of their operation, which included calling in the elite GSG9 special operations force.
“We cannot rule out that it is linked to terrorism but we can’t confirm it either, but we are also investigating in this direction”, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief of staff Peter Altmaier said.
“We believe we are dealing with a shooting rampage”, the spokeswoman said.
The 18-year-old stormed a McDonald’s outside the Olympia mall in Munich on Friday evening, police Chief Hubertus Andrae said.
► A video circulating on social media shows a man dressed in black outside a McDonalds by the roadside, drawing a handgun and shooting at passers-by. Andrae said police believe the video is genuine.
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The Munich police are calling it an “acute terror situation”, according to Der Spiegel (link in German). He died just before it got there, he said.
