Munich killer ‘planned gun attack for a year’
THE teenager gunman who killed nine people in Munich had planned his attack for a year, investigators said.
Robert Heimberger, head of Bavaria’s criminal police, said David Ali Sonboly, 18, who had a Glock pistol and more than 300 bullets, visited the site of a previous school shooting last year in the German town of Winnenden and took photographs.
He then set about planning last Friday’s attack, which also wounded 27 people, 10 critically, before taking his own life.
“He had been planning this crime since last summer,” said Mr Heimberger .
He said there were “many more terabytes” of information to evaluate, and that the teenager’s brother and parents were still not emotionally up to being interrogated by police.
There is so far no evidence that he knew any of his victims, or that there was any political motivation behind the attack, said Thomas Steinkraus-Koch, a spokesman for the Munich prosecutors’ office.
The suspect received both inpatient and outpatient psychiatric treatment last year to help him deal with “fears of contact with others,” Mr Steinkraus- Koch added. He said medication had been found at his home but that investigators needed to talk with his family to determine whether he had been taking it.
In the aftermath of the attack, Bavaria’s top security official urged a constitutional change to allow the country’s military to be able to be deployed in support of police during attacks.
Germany’s post-war constitution only allows the military, known as the Bundeswehr, to be deployed domestically in cases of national emergency.
But state Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper: “It would be completely incomprehensible ... if we had a terrorist situation like Brussels in Frankfurt, Stuttgart or Munich and we were not permitted to call in the well-trained forces of the Bundeswehr, even though they stand ready.”
Sonboly struck at a shopping centre and a nearby McDonald’s restaurant.
It was the second attack targeting victims apparently at random in less than a week in Bavaria.
A week ago, a 17-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker wounded five people in an axe-and-knife rampage near Wuerzburg, for which the Islamic State group has claimed responsibility.