Police gave a “cautious all clear” early Saturday morning, more than seven hours after the attack began and brought much of the city to a standstill as all public transit systems were shut down amid a massive manhunt.
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Munich police chief Hubertus Andrae told the news conference early on Saturday that the suspect had not been known to police and there were no known links to terror groups, although investigations were continuing.
His body was found in a side street close to the shopping centre at around 9.30pm local time.
He first opened fire in a local McDonald’s restaurant, before running to a nearby shopping mall.
Munich has large communities of people who fled the Balkan wars in the 1990s.
This is the third attack against civilians in Western Europe in eight days.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility but supporters of Islamic State celebrated the rampage on social media.
In the wake of the hunt police said they believed the teenager had committed suicide, although Mr Andrae said a post-mortem was needed to see if he died as a result of officers’ gunfire. Andrae said it was premature to say whether the Friday incident was a terrorist attack, as French President Francois Hollande said, or the work of a deranged person. “We can’t question the suspect so this is all a little more hard”.
A video posted online – whose authenticity could not be confirmed – showed a man dressed in black outside a McDonalds by the roadside, drawing a handgun and shooting towards members of the public.
Witness Luan Zequiri said he was in the mall when the shooting began.
Police said the victims killed in the massacre included adolescents, while there are children among the 16 people injured. Residents of Munich opened their doors to people seeking shelter using the Twitter hashtag #opendoor.
Chancellery staff met on Friday evening to assess the situation in Munich but German chancellor Angela Merkel was not present. “He lived right next to me”, Bild quoted a neighbour as saying. “We can’t confirm them, but we are investigating along those lines too”.
The shooting coincides with the fifth anniversary of the the massacre of 77 people in Norway by rightwing fanatic Anders Behring Breivik.
Munich was in lockdown after the shooting in the Bavarian capital, which Bavaria has classified as an “acute terrorist attack”. In all there were 2,300 officers involved, including the elite GSG9, SWAT teams from other German states and from neighboring Austria.
The mall is next to the stadium where the Palestinian militant group Black September took 11 Israeli athletes hostage and later killed them during the 1972 Olympic Games. The attackers were killed in standoffs with police.
Bavarian broadcaster BR said six people were dead and many wounded in the shopping mall.
It was the third major attack on French soil in the past 18 months.
The killings come after a 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker launched an axe and knife attack on passengers on a train in Wuerzburg, southern Germany on Monday. All survived, although one man from the train remains in life-threatening condition. The lone gunman later shot himself after encountering the police.
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The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the train attack, but authorities have said the teen – who was shot and killed by police – likely acted alone.
