Murderer was violent video fan who read Why Kids Kill
was being used in that way. “It’s disturbing, I dont know why he had the book,” he said. “It could be he was better trying to understand himself because he needed mental health treatment and he was trying to get help.
“A lot of young shooters look for an Anders Breivik, or someone similar, as a role model. And since the attack was on the [fifth] anniversary of the Norway attack, it suggests he was imitating Breivik,” he added.
The book was among documents about “frenzied attacks” found in his bedroom, with violent computer games. Police said Sonboly also had material relating to the killing of 16 pupils in Winnenden, Bavaria in 2009 and to the massacre by Breivik, a white supremacist who killed 77 people in 2011. One German newspaper claimed yesterday Sonboly had changed his online profile picture to an image of Breivik before he went out on what police called a “classic shooting rampage”. Prosecutors said it was “possible” he studied Breivik’s attack and that there was an “obvious” link.
Sonboly had also researched shooting spree techniques and may have been trying to lure his victims to the Olympia shopping centre with a Facebook post offering free food at the nearby McDonald’s.
The brutality of the massacre is in stark contrast to his relatively comfortable middle class background. Neighbours described Sonboly as “intelligent, quiet and shy”.
The student lived in a fifth-floor apartment in the Munich suburb of Maxvorstadt with his taxi driver and department store worker parents. The well-tended block is mostly home to immigrant families and sits above a Maserati sports car dealership.
Thomas de Maiziere, the German interior minister, said Sonboly’s parents were asylum-seekers from Iran who arrived in Germany in the late 1990s. Prosecutors said when they tried to interview them yesterday both were “too shocked” to give useful information.
A brother – described as “nicer than he is” by one neighbour – also lives at home. One local told the that Ali Sonboly “seemed a decent, normal guy,” while a café owner said he was “not very sporty, and a little chubby”.
He was apparently insecure about his nationality, despite being born and raised in a relatively affluent district of Munich. Like many teenagers he was also said to be “a little lazy” and was once seen dumping his newspaper round in a bin.
“One of the other neighbours told me he had psychological problems,” a local said, “but I never saw any evidence of it myself.” Sonboly was receiving psychiatric treatment for several mental disorders, including depression, according to prosecutors.
He seems to have felt persecuted by his classmates, claiming during the shooting he had suffered a seven-year bullying campaign. He was a “lonely teenager,” neighbours said, and rarely seen playing football outside with other teenagers.
Sonboly may also have felt rejected by his peers, who “blocked” him on social media networks after he sent them threatening abuse online. Others may have teased Sonboly about his Iranian background: the newspaper quoted one classmate as claiming he targeted “Turkish and Arab pupils” as they had bullied him particularly harshly.
“He was in my class back then, we always bullied him in school,” one person who claimed to be a ex-classmate of Sonboly said in an online forum. “He always told us that he would kill us.” Detectives said yesterday he “had no links whatsoever” to Islamic State terrorists but rather had run “amok”.
Sonboly was also obsessed with violent video games and was particularly active on an online network called Steam which allows users to play together, exchanging messages using keyboards and to talk via headsets.
According to several of Sonboly’s classmates had blocked him on the network after he began them abusive messages.
“About a year ago we kicked him out of the [Steam] group because he kept threatening us,” a onetime classmate told the German paper.
The ex-pupil added that Sonboly was able to return to the Steam network under different aliases and continued to send them abuse.
Among the aliases he used were: “Psycho,” “Until I see sense no more,” “Godlike” and “We will play this game to death”.
Then, on the day of the attack, Sonboly sent a final message to fellow students via interconnected headsets used to play the games remotely: “Come to the McDonald’s and I will come and get you and shoot you.”
At the time they dismissed the message as “hot air” as similar threats had been made before – only to realise hours later he had not been bluffing.
Yesterday afternoon, residents of the Munich suburb where Sonboly grew sending