“We suspect that this boy aged 16 years could have been aware of the act”, police said in a statement following Friday’s shooting spree after which the 18-year-old German-Iranian attacker, David Ali Sonboly, killed himself.
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The gunman had also been under psychiatric care in a hospital for two months in 2015, officials said on Sunday.
Heimberger said the gunman likely purchased his weapon – a reactivated Glock 17 pistol – on the shadowy dark net area of the Internet.
The German-Iranian student did not “deliberately select” those he shot during the melee, chief prosecutor Thomas Steinkraus-Koch said during the press conference.
The teenager who killed nine people in Munich on Friday had been planning the attack for over a year, according to German police.
But none of them were among the victims of the shooting.
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.
The shooting spree sparked a terror alert, with Europe on edge following a string of attacks claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group, but investigators have ruled out that Sonboly had any link with the jihadists.
Police believed it was an older weapon that had been reassembled, and were still working to establish where the attacker had obtained the 300 rounds of ammunition found in his rucksack.
Munich police say they have taken in for questioning a friend of the shooter who might have known of his attack plans.
Nor did the victims include anyone who commented on a fake Facebook page created by the gunman in May, using photographs and the name of a young Turkish woman, the officials said.
Investigators found a digital camera with photos he visited the site of a high school massacre in Winnenden, southern Germany, where 15 people died before the 17-year-old gunman committed suicide. Prescription medication for treatment of depression was found in Sonboly’s home, Steinkraus-Koch said, but it was not clear if he was regularly taking the medication. The mall shooting came just eight days after 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel used a truck to mow down 84 people, including children, in the French Riviera city of Nice.
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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.
