Munich gunman planned attacks for one year

Police said they caught the unnamed teen late Sunday and investigators were able to retrieve a deleted chat between him and the German-Iranian attacker on the messaging app WhatsApp. A 16-year-old who knew the gunman from playing Counter-Strike online told Der Speigel Sonboly was “very nationalistic” and frequently made xenophobic comments about Turks.

Investigators say the two teenagers met past year as in-patients at a psychiatric ward.

The shooting was one of four attacks in Germany – three of them by migrants – since July 18 that have left 10 people dead and 34 injured, a toll that may heighten public disquiet over Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door refugee policy.

Heimberger said he could not reveal details of the document yet because there were “many more terabytes” of information to evaluate, but described the gunman as a “devoted player” of group internet “killer games” pitting virtual shooters against each other. He was said to have been obsessed with mass shootings, and officials say it is probable he timed the attack for the five year anniversary of Anders Breivik’s massacre in Norway.

Earlier Sunday, a Syrian man killed a woman with a machete and wounded two others outside a bus station in the southwestern city of Reutlingen before being arrested.

Michael Siefener, a spokesman for the regional interior ministry, said the explosion “was set off deliberately”, adding that authorities were trying to establish the exact cause.

Although himself the son of Iranian asylum seekers, Sonboly reportedly yelled “anti-immigrant slurs” and shouted “I will kill you all” during his attack.

The blast is the third incident to hit the southern German state of Bavaria in a week, after nine were killed in a shooting rampage in Munich and several were wounded in an axe attack on a train.