How Munich gunman had plotted massacre for year
MUNICH mass killer Ali David Sonboly planned the slaughter for more than a year, it was revealed yesterday.
He hatched the evil plot after visiting a school where one of his “heroes” gunned down 15 people.
Sonboly, 18, left a hate-filled manifesto on his computer in which he raged against the world.
Bullied at school four years ago, he tried to lure some of his alleged tormentors to a Munich shopping centre on Friday.
Posing as a girl called Selina Akim, he offered to treat them to free burgers if they turned up at McDonald’s. Sonboly burst out of the restaurant and murdered seven teenagers and two adults with a semi-automatic pistol. The youngest was 14.
The killer wounded 35 others, 10 seriously, before shooting himself. None of the victims was a former classmate of the killer.
Police discovered he bought the murder weapon, a re-activated Glock 17, for £80 on the internet’s “dark web”. A similar firearm, a Glock 34, was one of two weapons used by mass killer Anders Breivik when he slaughtered 69 people at Utoya, Norway, in 2011.
Sonboly, of German-Iranian descent, hero-worshipped neo-Nazi Breivik and chose the fifth anniversary of the Norway bloodbath to launch his attack.
Police revealed yesterday that Sonboly visited the site of a school massacre in Winnenden, South-west Germany. Sonboly was obsessed with embittered schoolboy Thomas Kretschmer, who gunned down 15 classmates and teachers before shooting himself in 2009.
Police said Sonboly “gloried” in the Kretschmer outrage. A book, Why Kids Kill: Inside The Minds Of School Shooters, was found in the backpack he was wearing during Friday’s attack.
In 2015 Sonboly spent two months in a Munich clinic, where he was treated for depression.
Police chief Robert Heimberger said: “We found a manifesto on his computer. It was simple revenge he was seeking.
“He felt bullied and insulted in school and on Friday he wanted to settle the score with his former school friends. His crime was prepared for over a year.”
Thomas Steinkraus-Koch, Munich public prosecutor, stressed: “The criminal did not seek out foreigners to shoot and there were no former classmates of his among the victims.”
Last night police said a 16-year-old friend of the gunman had been arrested for not reporting plans of the shooting.
THE cycle of Islamic terrorism continues to intensify. As the shadow of violence lengthens across Europe, every week seems to bring a new round of atrocities.
In recent days the catalogue of blood-soaked incidents has been savage. It includes the Nice massacre by immigrant Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the axe assault on a train at Würzburg, Germany, by refugee Riaz Khan, and the stabbing of a mother and her three daughters at a French holiday camp by a Moroccan Muslim who took offence at their clothes.
Here in Britain there was an attempted kidnap of an RAF serviceman at a Norfolk airbase by two abductors of “Middle Eastern appearance”.
On Friday night the Bavarian city of Munich became the arena for another bloodbath as Ali Sonboly, son of Iranian immigrants, killed nine people before shooting himself.
Then last night a Syrian refugee with a machete murdered a woman near Stuttgart in Germany. In many of these cases the perpetrator yelled “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is Great”).
The burgeoning list of outrages should have provoked a new spirit of determination from our leaders to protect our civilisation. Instead, they have indulged in more appeasement, denial and cowardice.
Clinging with destructive obstinacy to their cherished policies of mass immigration and cultural diversity, they refuse to face up to the lethal Islamist threat in our midst.
AKEY aspect of this feebleness is their enthusiasm for empty rituals rather than tough action. So they attend their vigils with solemn faces, light their candles, sign their books of condolences and fly their flags at half mast. But it is all meaningless.
They talk of “solidarity” yet they are the ones who have wilfully torn apart the social fabric of Europe with their attachment to demographic revolution.
Just as grotesque is all the earnest talk about “praying for Munich” or Nice or wherever from politicians who have treated Europe’s Christian heritage with contempt. Alongside these hollow gestures there is often a mood of self-abasement, particularly from Left-wing commentators who blame the West for Islamic violence.
According to this guilttripping narrative, the perpetrators are driven to violence by poverty or inadequate social housing or foreign policy or the legacy of Empire or Islamophobia. But this is all just pathetic buck-passing. Most western European countries have been remarkably generous in supporting vast numbers of migrants, but the response to this benevolence has been growing conflict.
The Würzburg axe attacker, for instance, was accepted into Germany as a teenage refugee, even though he appears to have lied about his age and background. In addition, he was offered an apprenticeship at a bakery, given taxpayers’ money for his upkeep and taken in by Catholic foster parents.
Yet he reacted to this institutional and personal kindness with murderous rage fuelled by the vile separatist creed of militant Islam. “Pray for me that I can take revenge on these infidels and go to paradise,” he wrote privately before his rampage.
Just as misguided is the fashionable rush to blame mental illness for this spate of attacks. Both the Munich shooter and the Nice lorry killer are reported to have been suffering from “depression”, just as Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at an Orlando gay nightclub in June is said to have been “bi-polar”. The theory goes that these crimes are so sick that they must be a product of a sick mind.
But that is wrong on so many levels. For a start, it is highly offensive to people with genuine mental health problems. In an opportunistic attempt to explain away mass murder, this descent into phoney psychiatry could end up demonising real sufferers and undermining public support for improved mental healthcare.
Besides, the diagnosis seems profoundly mistaken. People who are in the grip of severe psychosis or depression do not act like these killers whose crimes are characterised by cold-blooded ruthlessness, chilling efficiency and careful planning. Ali Sonboly, terrorist or not, brought 300 rounds of ammunition for his killing spree in Munich, hardly the behaviour of a madman.
BUT above all, blather about mental illness lets fundamentalist Islam off the hook, which is precisely why so many appeasers resort to it. But the creed is central to any understanding of the present carnage.
It is the ideology that provides the rationale for the actions of the terrorists, firing their hatred of western values and driving their violent separatist agenda. That is why Islamic State has cheered the rising death toll.
In truth, the atrocities in the West are no different to the pattern of lethal mayhem that jihadism inflicts throughout the rest of the world. The Orlando horror matched the murderous homophobia of the hardliners in Iraq and Syria who delight in throwing gay men to their deaths.
At the infamous Bataclan massacre in Paris last November several of the victims are reported by police witnesses to have been castrated, beheaded or had their eyes gouged out. But that is no different to the abominations of IS. Militant Islam is the problem, not housing or mental illness.
The reason we are seeing an upsurge in this kind of violence across western Europe is simple. Our politicians decided to transform parts of our once peaceful societies into Islamified sections where instability and discord are endemic. We are now paying a terrible price for this suicidal folly.
‘Leaders have failed to protect civilisation’