Details on Munich gunman emerge
Officials say shooter had no ties to Islamic State, other extremists
MUNICH — Authorities here said Saturday that the teenage gunman who went on a rampage at a shopping center Friday, leaving nine people dead, had no ties to the Islamic State or other extremist groups. Instead, police say, they believe he was “obsessed” with mass killings and may have been a depressed loner who was bullied in school.
The southern German city’s police chief said investigators searching the assailant’s family apartment found a trove of electronic data and written materials suggesting that he was fascinated by shooting sprees before he went on one of his own Friday. The items recovered included a book, translated into German, by a U.S. academic on school shootings titled “Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters.”
“He was very intensely interested in the subject,” said Munich police chief Hubertus Andrae, who described the mass shooting as a “classic act by a deranged person.”
Authorities did not release the name of the assailant, but German media reported that his name was David Ali Sonboly, the 18year-old son of a limousine driver and a department store clerk who was born and raised in Munich. The parents migrated to Germany from Iran.
The German-Iranian teen may have been the target of intense bullying by peers, police said. In a video taken during the rampage, Sonboly complains of being bullied.
Instead of being inspired by Islamic State terror, police investigators said, Sonboly may have been influenced in some way by the Norwegian mass murderer and domestic terrorist Anders Behring Breivik.
Munich authorities said there was “an obvious link” between the Munich shooter and the massacre carried out by Breivik on July 22, 2011.
Friday’s shooting in Munich — the third mass attack in Europe since the Bastille Day truck carnage in Nice, France, nine days ago — took place on the fifth anniversary of Breivik’s attacks in Oslo and on the island of Utoya. Breivik killed 77 people, first by exploding a bomb in a van and then by stalking his victims with a gun at a summer camp. At the time, Breivik released a statement calling for the deportation of Muslims, whom he decried as enemies alongside “cultural Marxists.”
The news service DPA reported, citing a German security official, that the killer had not been known to police but that he admired the 17-year-old who killed 15 people in a shooting spree at a school in Winnenden, near Stuttgart, in 2009.
A security officer close to the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is active, said the shooter “behaved like he was in a video game.”