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Teenage friend of Munich gunman arrested

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.

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Steinkraus-Koch said Sonboly spent two months in a closed psychiatric ward in 2015 and received treatment for “social phobias” and anxiety.

Bavarian investigator Robert Heimberger said the shooter visited the site of a previous school shooting in the German town of Winnenden and took photographs a year ago, then set about planning Friday’s attack, according to Associated Press.

The teenager “handed himself in to police shortly after the killing spree and had been questioned on his relationship with the perpetrator”, the statement added.

They said medication for his problems had been found in his room.

On Sunday evening, an estimated 1,500 people gathered at the shopping centre where the attack unfolded to light candles and lay floral tributes in memory of the victims, the majority of whom were teenagers. But toxicological and autopsy results were still not available, so it’s not yet clear whether he was taking the medicine when he went on his shooting rampage Friday, killing nine people and leaving dozens wounded.

“There is a suspicion that the 16-year-old is a possible tacit accomplice to [Friday’s] attack”, police said in a statement Sunday, reported by broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

Mr Heimberger added that the parents of the gunman remained in shock and were not able to be interviewed.

Police have been probing claims that the killer felt bullied by his peers and that he may have been inspired by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people exactly five years before the Munich shootings.

Police say they now have a presence in the shopping centre and are in contact with its management.

The weapon was likely to have been purchased through a website trafficking illegal weapons on the so-called “dark web”, and was a re-activated gun that had been modified to use in theatres.

He said the weapon had been rendered unusable and sold as a prop before being restored to its original function.

Kosovo held a day or mourning Sunday for three young ethnic Albanians – two women and one man – who were among the nine people killed in the shooting in Munich.

The shooter killed himself after the rampage near a Munich mall.

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Because of the Nazi era, Germany’s post-war constitution only allows the military, known as the Bundeswehr, to be deployed domestically in cases of national emergency.

Ali Sonboly shooting children in Munich mall