On its second day of investigation into the motives behind David Ali Sonboly shooting spree, the Bavarian crime office provided additional details into his motives after searching the Munich shooter’s home, and said that it found materials consistent with the theory that he had been planning the attack for a whole year prior to the act. Police also say a manifesto was left at the site of the shooting.
Bavarian investigator Robert Heimberger said the 18-year-old shooter visited the site of a previous school shooting in the German town of Winnenden and took photographs. In what will likely be an early pivot to blaming video game violence, he said the shooter was an avid player of first-person shooter video games, including “Counter-Strike: Source.” Thomas Steinkraus-Koch, spokesman for Munich prosecutors’ office said there is still no evidence of any political motivation to the crime, nor that the shooter killed specific victims.
The prosecutor’s office announced that the victims in the shooting were not classmates of the shooter. They were subsequently discovered to have been children of immigrants.
According to Sueddeutsche Zeitung, the shooter bought the Glock he used online through the so called “dark net”, the concealed area of the internet accessed normally by people looking for illegal services or items. Considering Germany’s unprecedented gun ownership and purchasing laws, this does fit the narrative.
As RT reports, the first to identify Sonboly was his own father. He was the one who contacted the police after seeing a video filmed by one of the witnesses, as the attack was in progress.
In maintaining the story that the gunman was a lone wolf who had an obssession with mass killings, German media reported that Sonboly had some problems socializing with peers and had failed a college exam on the very day of the tragedy.
According to Bild am Sonntag, Sonboly’s issues extended to being bullied by some classmates, particularly of Turkish and Arabic descent. According to one Bavarian official, the young shooter visited the site of a 2009 school shooting in southwest Germany that killed 15 people – an event that served as inspiration for the attack. Several years ago, Sonboly had also been mugged and beaten, being injured in the attack. Sonboly who was then still a boy, went to the police.
With focus shifting on his mental state, additional details obtained by the German tabloid revealed that he also allegedly suffered from ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactive, its authenticity sometimes debated in the medical community.
The spokesman for Munich prosecutors’ office also said the gunman had received psychiatric treatment last year. The 18-year-old, identified only as David S., “received inpatient treatment in 2015 for two months and after that received outpatient care,” said Thomas Steinkraus-Koch.
“The suspect had fears of contact with others” and also depression.
As we reported yesterday, in the initial Munich police report it was noted that Ali was obsessed with mass shootings. Police earlier speculated about the young German-Iranian’s fascination with Norwegian killer Anders Breivik, the neo-Nazi who claimed 77 lives in a shooting rampage several years back.
It was speculated if the manifesto found at the scene of Sonboly’s crime had matched Breivik’s, but the police denied any connection. Sonboly had used a hacked Facebook profile to lure victims to their deaths with McDonald’s food.
In other news, Bavaria’s top security official says Germany needs to be able to call upon its military in times of crisis like Friday night’s shooting rampage at a Munich mall. As AP reports, with an eye on the Nazi era excesses, Germany’s post-war constitution only allows the Bundeswehr to be deployed domestically in a national emergency. But state Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann told Welt am Sonntag newspaper Sunday the regulations are obsolete, with “an absolutely stable democracy in our country.”
“In extreme situations — like for example the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels — we should also be able to call upon the Bundeswehr in Germany,” he said. “It makes no sense to say we categorically reject that.”
It appears that in addition to pivoting away from a story of “radical Islam” striking again, despite many objections of a narrative that does not fit, including witness accounts that the shooter had screamed Allhu Akbar as CNN reported on Friday, Germany is now doubling down on a story of a sick, mentally-troubled individual, who played a lot of first-person shooters, and who had been bullied by his “Turkish and Arabian” classmates, and who decided to take out his anger on fellow children in a mass shooting which ended with his suicide.
And, most importantly, Germany has now opened the doors to summoning the Bundeswehr – the military – the next time an “extreme situation” such as this one takes place. And so Germany (and Europe) takes one more step to a full police state lock down during upcoming – and inevitable – future terrorist (or lone wolf) assaults.
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