Not an Islamist, but inspired by a terrorist

Munich shooter Ali Sonboly lead a troubled life and had two previous encounters with the police, both times as victim

HE HAD been bullied at more than one school. He played violent video games and developed a fascination with mass shootings. He kept a copy of the German edition of ‘Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters,’ a study by an American academic psychologist, and he was treated for psychiatric problems.

Somewhere along the way, Ali Sonboly got his hands on a 9-millimetre Glock handgun, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition for it. And at 5:52 pm Friday, at a Mcdonald’s in Munich a few miles from where he lived with his mother, father and brother, he started shooting.

Sonboly, 18, moved on to a shopping mall across the street, then to the top level of an adjacent parking garage. By the time his rampage was done, he had killed eight other young people and one middle-aged person. Then, in front of two police officers, he killed himself with his own gun, the police said.

It was the third mass attack in Europe in little over a week, after the killings of 84 people in Nice, France, and an attack by a young refugee wielding an ax and a knife in Germany that left five people wounded.

But unlike those two attacks, the one in Munich appeared, based on initial evidence, to have no overt links to the Islamic State or other terrorist groups, officials said.

Instead, according to accounts by the police, prosecutors, and neighbours and schoolmates of Sonboly, this most recent assault appeared to be of a less ideological and more personal sort: a sudden, violent outlet for a quietly troubled young man.

There were indications that Sonboly’s rampage might not have been entirely without political overtones. It was carried out on the fifth anniversary of a massacre in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing extremist who killed 77 people. Asked about a possible link based on the date, the Munich police chief, Hubertus Andrae, said that “this connection is obvious” and was part of their investigation. “We must assume that he was aware of this attack,” Andrae said.

But the initial picture of Sonboly that emerged in the hours after police officers found him dead, less than a mile from the shopping mall with a backpack full of ammunition and a single bullet wound to his head, was of a young man whose concerns were much closer to home.

Born and raised in Munich, he held both German and Iranian citizenship. His parents immigrated to Germany, and his father drives a cab. A student at a nearby public school, he was known to adult neighbours as a polite boy who delivered newspapers. He grew up in a secular household, neighbours said.

Some news reports identified him as David Ali Sonboly, though he was known to everyone as Ali.

“He was always friendly, very friendly,” said Tovaiau Edo, 32, who lives in the family’s building. “When I saw him and saw the story, it’s like two different people. Not the same people. I cannot believe this.”

A victim of bullying

But officials and neighbours said that Sonboly had been struggling on several levels. He had two previous encounters with the police, both times as a victim, once having been bullied by three other young people and once having been robbed. He spent considerable time playing violent online video games. He had been getting psychiatric treatment, possibly for depression, officials said.

“He was always nice, kind, helpful,” said a 14-year-old neighbour who attended the same school on Alfons Street as the attacker and asked to be identified only by her first name, Safete.

Safete said that she had seen the attacker at their apartment building around midday Friday and that “he didn’t greet me, like he normally does.”

“He was focused on the papers he was holding,” she added. “He didn’t look up.”

Safete said the gunman had argued at one point with a schoolmate, “and said that he was going to go on a shooting rampage.”

Safete’s 15-year-old cousin, who gave her name as Majlinda and attends the same school, said the gunman had been bullied at his current school and a former one.

“This has nothing to do with Islam,” she said. “It’s because he was bullied.”

A woman in a neighboring building, whose balcony faced the Sonboly family’s balcony, said she and her 10-year-old son had become friendly with Ali. But the woman, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Paulina, said she and her son had both noticed something off about him.

“Ali was somehow closed up on the inside,” Paulina said. “He had something. I don’t know what it is, but something was wrong.”

There were hints that his rampage had been premeditated. In a raid at 3:30 am Saturday on his family’s apartment in the Maxvorstadt neighbourhood, which includes some of the city’s renowned art museums and is adjacent to the city’s historic centre, authorities found newspaper articles on police responses to other shooting rampages, as well as the book on school gunmen. The police also removed computer equipment, documents and other materials.

Three of those killed were 14 years old, two were 15, and the others were 17, 19, 20 and 45. Three of the nine were female. All lived in the Munich area, officials said.

Of the 27 people injured, 10 were in critical condition, including a 13-year-old boy.

‘I am German’

After carrying out the shootings in the shopping mall, Sonboly retreated to the parking garage. From the top level, he engaged in a shouting match with one or more people at a distance, with the expletive-filled exchange recorded on video.

One of the bystanders fumed at “Turks,” and the gunman replied, “I am German,” “I was born here,” and “I grew up here in a Hartz IV area,” a reference to a tier of unemployment and welfare benefits.

He seems to have eluded the police at that point, while authorities were scrambling to respond to reports, later proved unfounded, of gunfire elsewhere and that there might have been as many as three attackers armed with long guns. At the height of the emergency, 2,300 officers were deployed.

Among the many questions facing authorities as Munich slowly returned to normal was how Sonboly had gotten a handgun and so much ammunition, despite Germany’s strict gun laws.

The serial number of the Glock had been scratched off, complicating authorities’ ability to trace the firearm, Robert Heimberger, chief of the Bavarian State Criminal Police, said at a news conference.

The teenager did not have a licence to own a gun.

There will also be questions about whether schools, social services and Sonboly’s family failed to take sufficient notice of his problems, and about the degree to which other attacks and violence in popular culture might have influenced him.

“We cannot ignore — and I don’t know the solution, but without a doubt, and this was the case in this instance — that the glorifying of violence in Internet games has a damaging effect on the development of young people,” Thomas de Maizière, the German Interior Minister, said. NYT