DUSHANBE July 25, 2016, Asia-Plus — The teenager who shot and killed nine people in the Munich massacre on July 2 reportedly used Facebook to lure his victims to a McDonald’s.
The Telegraph
reports Ali David Sonboly, 18, launched his killing spree in the Bavarian city in an apparent revenge attack for being bullied. It is now thought he targeted youngsters of “Turkish and Arab” origin, having claimed those groups had picked on him in school.
Sonboly, who killed himself at the end of the attack, had set up a fake Facebook account using the identity of a pretty teenage girl.
Using the name “Selina Akim”, Sonboly posted a message hours before the attack saying: “Come today at four o’clock to McDonald’s at OEZ [shopping center]. I am giving away anything you want as long as it’s not too expensive.”
Among those he murdered were a group of four children – aged 14 and 15 – who were mown down at the table where they were eating.
In all, seven of his victims were teenagers and the oldest was a 45-year-old mother of two of Turkish descent.
Police said the killings were not terrorist-related. They added that Sonboly was armed with an unlicensed Glock 9mm pistol and had 300 rounds of ammunition in his backpack.
Angela Merkel, the chancellor, said her nation “mourned with a heavy heart”, adding: “A night like this is difficult for us all to bear.”
Prosecutors said Sonboly was suffering from mental illness and had received psychiatric treatment in the months leading up to the killings.
In a raid on his family apartment in an affluent suburb of Munich, police discovered extremist material linked to mass shootings, including the attack by Anders Behring Breivik, the white supremacist who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011.
The massacre in Munich took place on the fifth anniversary of the Norway attacks and Sonboly had recently changed a profile picture on an online messaging service to one of Breivik.
Sonboly also had documents relating to a gun attack on a school in Bavaria in 2009 in which 16 teenagers were killed as well as a book called
Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters
.
On the day of the attack, according to the newspaper
Bild
, Sonboly told associates via a computer game message: “Come to the McDonald’s and I will come and get you and shoot you.”
Four of the teenagers, all friends, killed by Sonboly were named last night as Can Leyla, 14, and his friend Selcuk Kilic, 15, both of Turkish origin, and two girls: Sabina Sulaj and Armela Segashi, both 14. A fifth member of the group was critically injured.
Reuters
is reporting that Germany’s already strict gun laws could be tightened further.
