A TEENAGE friend of the gunman who killed nine people in Munich has been arrested by German police.
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The 16-year-old, a friend of Munich shooter David Ali Sonboly, is an Afghan who is being investigated for not reporting Sonboly’s plans to kill others to the authorities, according to the BBC News.
The boy reportedly handed himself to police after the deadly attack on Friday evening which shocked the world.
Munich police say they have arrested the 16-year-old friend of the 18-year-old shooter who killed nine people at a shopping mall on Friday. He said medication had been found at his home but that investigators needed to talk with his family to determine whether he had been taking it.
Robert Heimberger, head of Bavaria’s criminal police, said the gunman had been planning the attack since he paid a visit a year ago to the town of Winnenden – the scene of a previous school shooting in 2009 – and took photographs.
Investigators said they saw an “obvious link” between the killings and white supremacist Anders Breivik’s massacre of 77 people in Norway exactly five years earlier.
Law enforcement officials piecing together a portrait of the shooter said he was seeing a doctor as recently as last month for treatment of depression and psychiatric problems that began in 2015 with inpatient hospital care and then was followed up with outpatient visits.
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.
He said it was likely the Glock pistol – which had been reactivated – was bought on the “dark net” market, an area accessible only with the use of special software. It had been a theatre prop, but had been restored to fully functioning.
His parents remained too distraught to question, Heimberger said.
Heimberger said the McDonald’s restaurant where most of the victims died was a hangout for youths of immigrant backgrounds, and the dead included victims of Hungarian, Turkish, Greek, and Kosovo Albanian backgrounds and a stateless person.
In the aftermath of Friday’s attack, Bavaria’s top security official urged a constitutional change to allow the country’s military to be able to be deployed in support of police during attacks. Germany’s postwar constitution allows the military to be deployed domestically only in cases of national emergency.
The 27-year-old had meant to target a nearby music festival in the city of Ansbach, news agency DPA quoted regional interior minister Joachim Herrmann saying.
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“It would be completely incomprehensible. if we had a terrorist situation like Brussels in Frankfurt, Stuttgart or Munich and we were not permitted to call in the well-trained forces of the Bundeswehr”, he said.
