Germany grapples with enigma of Munich gunman
nvestigators were seeking clues on Sunday into the mind of gunman David Ali Sonboly, the teen author of one of Germany’s bloodiest killing sprees.
Sonboly’s rampage at a Munich shopping mall on Friday sparked a terror alert, with fears that Germany had followed France and Belgium this year in becoming targets of the IS group.
But after a forensic sweep of Sonboly’s home, investigators on Saturday ruled out any link with the ruthless militants. Using a 9mm handgun, the 18-year-old German-Iranian shot dead nine people, most of them fellow teenagers, before killing himself with a shot to the head.
Thirty-five others were injured, 11 of them seriously, according to a new toll released by Munich police on Sunday. Those figures included people who hurt themselves while fleeing.
While investigators have ruled out a link to IS, their probe has turned up another dark scenario — of a violencefixated youth who tempted his young prey to their fate via the Internet.
Sonboly probably hacked a girl’s Facebook account and used it to lure victims to a McDonald’s outlet where they expected to get vouchers for price reductions, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said, describing it as “particularly underhand”.
But if a clearer picture is emerging of how Sonboly planned the killing, his motive remains unclear.
Investigators describe Sonboly, who lived with his parents in social housing, as a depressive obsessed with shooting sprees and a devotee of violent video games.
They found documents about farright fanatic Anders Behring Breivik who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011 — a massacre that occurred exactly five years to the day before the Munich shootings.
But what drove him to commit a mass killing? Neighbours said Sonboly was born to Iranian parents, a taxi driver father and a mother who worked at a department store. They arrived in Germany as asylumseekers in the late 1990s.
The family lived in the well-heeled Maxvorstadt neighbourhood in a tidy social housing block that is mostly home to immigrant families.
One idea put forward by the mass circulation newspaper Bild suggests Sonboly had been bullied by Turks at school, and wanted to take revenge against foreigners.
The dead included three Turks, two of whom had dual German nationality, a Hungarian, a Kosovan, a Greek and an individual who was stateless, according to the latest figures.
While investigators have ruled out a link to IS, their probe has turned up another dark scenario — of a violence-fixated youth who tempted his young prey to their fate via the Internet.