Shooting

But none of these youngsters were among the shooting spree victims, police stressed.

They added there was no evidence that any of the dead were lured to the McDonald’s branch by promises of discounts that Sonboly had sent out from a fake Facebook account, an act Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere has described as “particularly underhand”.

Sonboly was obsessed with Anders Behring Breivik, whose massacre of 77 people in Norway came exactly five years before his own shooting spree.

But police also believe the teenager was influenced by a previous shooting in Winnenden, southwest Germany in 2009, when a 17-year-old shot 15 people in his former school before killing himself.

Born to Iranian parents who came to Germany in the 1990s as asylum-seekers, Sonboly lived in social housing in Munich’s well-heeled Maxvorstadt neighbourhood.

Video footage from Friday apparently shows Sonboly on a car park roof in a heated exchange with a man on a nearby balcony.

“I’m German, I was born here,” the blackclad assailant replies after the man swore at him, using curse words for foreigners.

Of Shiite Muslim origin, Sonboly appears to have converted to Christianity.

The killings have sparked a debate about whether Germany’s strict gun laws should be tightened further, and the fact that Sonboly was able to acquire the pistol online will raise questions over how to stop others from doing the same.

Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, in an interview with the Funke press group, called for a maximum effort to “restrict access to lethal weapons and monitor it closely”.

European leaders swiftly voiced solidarity with Germany as the terror alert was launched — a sign of the jittery mood after a string of jihadist assaults.

The attack came just four days after a 17-year-old asylum seeker went on a rampage with an axe and a knife on a train in Bavaria, injuring five people. He was believed to be a “lone wolf” Afghan or Pakistani inspired by IS.

And it occurred just over a week after a Tunisian used a truck to mow down 84 people after a Bastille Day fireworks display in Nice, the third major attack on French soil in the past 18 months.

IS described Nice gunman Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel as one of its “soldiers”, though investigators have not found direct proof of his allegiance to the jihadists.