Germany tries to make sense of carnage

German Chancellor Angela Merkel convened an emergency meeting of her security cabinet on Saturday as police ruled out any terrorist motive behind a teenage gunman’s rampage in Munich that left 10 people dead including the killer.

Munich police said that a search of the home of the suspect, an 18-yearold German-Iranian who was born and raised in the city, yielded no evidence of any link to terrorism but showed that he had studied past shooting incidents. The attacker acted alone, and there is an apparent connection with the fifth anniversary of the murders committed by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway, they said.

“We’re working on the assumption that this was a classic shooting-spree assailant without any political motivation,” Thomas Steinkraus-Koch, the Bavarian state prosecutor, told reporters on Saturday. Hubertus Andrae, the head of Munich police department, added that there was no indication of any connection with Islamic State. Instead, newspaper articles and a book about school shootings found in the suspect’s bedroom suggested “an intensive interest” in such incidents.

The assailant shot dead nine people at a shopping mall in the north of Munich before turning the gun on himself after a siege lasting several hours into the early hours of Saturday morning. Some 24 people were wounded in the attack that caused mass panic as authorities shut down public transport services and the city went into lockdown.

Police told residents to stay indoors and the main train station was evacuated as federal police and special forces joined in the manhunt. The alleged perpetrator’s body was found a short distance from the scene. In his possession were a 9mm Glock pistol with the serial number scratched out and more than 300 rounds of ammunition in his backpack. Of the victims, most were teenagers, police said.

Germany has so far been spared the type of terrorist attack that killed hundreds in Paris, Nice and Brussels, though the authorities have repeatedly warned that the threat remains high. Tensions have risen since mass sexual assaults in Cologne and other cities on New Year’s Eve and an attack on Monday near the Bavarian town of Treuchtlingen in which two people were critically injured with an ax on a train by a 17-year-old Afghan refugee, whom police later shot and killed.

Overnight, special forces raided the Munich suspect’s apartment, which he shared with his parents, and removed boxes. Television channels carried a video posted on YouTube purporting to show an exchange between the attacker and a resident in which the suspect, armed with a gun, shouted that he had been treated for some unspecified illness. Police said that toxicology tests will be conducted for any evidence of anti-depressive drugs.