Munich gunman planned attack for a year

Seven of his victims were themselves teenagers, who police said he may have lured to their deaths via a hacked Facebook account on what was the fifth anniversary of twin attacks by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik that killed 77 people.

The Munich attack is the third attack in Europe in just over a week in which 27 people were also injured, some seriously.

Police released more details of Munich attacker David Ali Sonboly on Sunday, saying the 18-year-old was depressed and had spent two months in a psychiatric unit last year.

“An explosion went off in the city centre and a man, who the latest enquiries show caused it, was killed in the event”, police said in a statement.

Munich police chief Hubertus Andrae said, “There is absolutely no link to Daesh”, he said, adding that the suspect had been obsessed with books and articles about mass killings “linked to maniacs”.

In a furious exchange with the man who was filming him as he paced the top floor of an empty parking deck, the killer also insisted “I am German!” after the man wielding his cellphone to record the video called him a derogatory term for a foreigner.

“The question of terrorism or a rampage is tied to motive, and we don’t know the motive”, Andrae said.

Police, citing witnesses, had initially said they were looking for up to three suspects and were treating the incident as a suspected terrorist attack.

De Maiziere said a unit of federal police had been readied on Friday given initial indications of a possible large militant attack, but in the end it was not used.

“The perpetrator had been engaged with his attack for about a year, had been planning it since the last summer”, Heimberger told journalists at the press conference.

But none of them were among the victims of the shooting.

Munich police spokeswoman said six people were killed and an undetermined number wounded.

Sonboly appeared to have been the victim of bullying by fellow pupils back in 2012, filing a complaint against three of his tormentors.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called a special meeting of her government’s security Cabinet, meeting Saturday with de Maziere, other ministers and the head of the country’s security agencies. On Monday, a 17-year-old Afghan wounded four people in an axe-and-knife attack on a regional train near the Bavarian city of Wuerzburg, and another woman outside as he fled. “And it’s even more hard to bear because we have had so much bad news in so few days”.

“Then we have to evaluate very carefully if and where further legal changes are needed”, he told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper in an interview published on Sunday.

Most of the victims in Friday’s attack were young people, with three aged just 14, police said.

Investigators found a digital camera with photos he visited the site of a high school massacre in Winnenden, southern Germany, where 15 people died before the 17-year-old gunman committed suicide.

Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said there were several signs he had been suffering from “not insignificant psychological troubles”.

Already steeped in grief and shock, Germans were further rattled by news that a Syrian refugee had killed 45-year-old Polish woman with a machete in the city of Reutlingen.

Andrae said a vast array of electronic evidence had been seized from the suspect’s apartment, and suggested video games could be among the items recovered.

The gunman was among those found dead.

While U.S. shoppers don’t want to be subjected to metal detectors, Consolo said, overall, such attacks are likely to push mall owners to increase security measures.