The teenage gunman who killed nine people in a shooting rampage in Munich had been treated for depression and paranoia and appeared to have begun planning the attack about a year ago, German authorities said Sunday.
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[Photo by Johannes Simon/Getty Images]While the German police hasn’t revealed the name of the Munich gunman – apart from the fact that he is 18-years-old and has dual German and Iranian nationality – neighbors of the teenager, who live next to the apartment where the police conducted a search, told CNN that his name was Ali Sonboly.
The killer also played first-person shooter games and obtained the murder weapon over the dark web, the Bavarian Federal Criminal Office said.
“We’re still working on the assumption that this isn’t a political motivated crime”, the State Prosecutor’s said of the attack, which began on Friday afternoon at a McDonald’s restaurant across the street from Olympia-Einkaufszentrum mall in Munich.
A further 27 people were injured in Friday’s attack – 10 of whom are in a critical condition, including a 13-year-old boy.
Most of the dead were teenagers, and six had a non-German background, police said. A book entitled “Rampage in Head: Why Students Kill”, was found during searches of the home he shared with his parents in Dachauer Strasse, in the Munich suburb of Maxvorstadt.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the tragedy had plunged Germany into “deep and profound mourning” that left a “night of horror” lying behind the people of Munich.
“He had been planning this crime since last summer”, Heimberger told reporters.
In the wake of the shooting attack in Munich on Friday, senior Germany politicians have called for stricter controls on the sale of guns.
“[He] said he would treat them to what they wanted as long as it wasn’t too expensive – that was the invitation”, Heimberger said, according to Reuters.
Turkey’s foreign minister said three Turkish citizens were among nine people killed in the Munich attack while Greece’s foreign ministry said one Greek was among the dead.
State government officials told a news conference that the victims of the attack had not been specifically targeted and were not classmates of the gunman. He was carrying a 9mm Glock pistol and still had some 300 rounds of ammunition on him when he shot himself, police said Saturday.
“Germany has a good system of legal gun ownership, but illegal firearms pose a big problem”, said Nils Duquet, a weapons expert in Belgium who works for the Flemish Peace Institute.
Talking to the media, Munich police chief, Hubertus Andrae, said, “He was very intensely interested in the subject”. 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.
It is thought he may have been inspired by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people five years prior to the Munich shootings.
Instead, it appeared that Sonboly used a Facebook account opened in May under a false name, or the name of a real girl who was not involved in the shooting, to invite people to the McDonald’s across from the mall, promising free food.
“[He] was obsessed with shooting rampages”, he said.
It was the second incident targeting victims apparently at random in less than a week in Bavaria.
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Munich gunman was a victim of bullying and was depressed.
