Munich attack: City reels from night of terror and bloodshed

A tall man with dark hair and dressed in black paces nervously on a flat roof, the red straps of his rucksack the only flash of colour. He stares down at the flat, matte plastic of the Glock 17 pistol in his hands then dashes out of sight, down the stairs and into an alley, north of the sprawling Olympia Shopping Centre (OEZ) in Munich.

It is a mild Friday evening and the man’s shooting spree at a fast food restaurant and a shopping centre has plunged the beautiful Bavarian capital into panic and fear.

Convoys of police vans have raced north to Moosach, north of the city centre. Police helicopters are swooping overhead.

Plain-clothes policemen have fanned out through the shopping centre, leading panicked shoppers to safety. Social media buzzes with police instructions – stay indoors, avoid the centre. Social media is also abuzz with ill-informed speculation: there’s been a shooting on the Karlsplatz square, too, there’s a gunman in a city beerhall. There are three gunmen. None of this is true, but no one knows that yet.

In the minutes around 6pm, an 18-year-old killed nine people – four alone inside the fast food restaurant – and wounded many more. Now cornered by police, who try to talk to him, he instead raises the gun and shoots himself in the head – and into Germany’s shooting spree annals.

Troubled life

It was the end of the short, troubled life of Ali David Sonboly, born in 1998 in Munich, one of two sons of a couple of Iranian origin. His father owns a taxi company; his mother works in a department store.

“Very nice, very educated people,” said one neighbour to a local Munich radio station. “The father speaks fluent German, even reads Kant and Schopenhauer.”

The Sonboly boys grew up with dual Iranian-German citizenship, though in the last minutes of his life, Ali David Sonboly shouted from the car park rooftop “I’m German . . . ”

The shaky video recorded by a resident contains a clue to another piece of the puzzle: troubled school years at the hands of Turkish and Arab youths.

“I was bullied, seven years long, because of you damn Turks!” the gunman can be heard in the video, shouting into the air from the rooftop.

Filming him was Thomas Salbey, a 57-year-old local man having a beer on his balcony.

"I heard the shots, then I saw him running for the car park and threw my empties after him," he told the Bild tabloid.

After Salbey can be heard calling the gunman “an asshole . . . a wanker”, Sonboly disappeared from the roof, firing at the man’s balcony. Salbey pointed police to where he was. After a first confrontation, and a missed shot from police, the man in black fled. After 90 minutes a second confrontation in an alley ended with Sonboly’s suicide at 8.30pm.

But it would be another six hours before Munich police chief Hubertus Andrä gave the all-clear. In the intervening hours Munich investigators had fielded 4,310 emergency calls – four days’ worth. Almost all a waste of police time and resources.

At 2.24am, having established that the dead man acted alone, police storm his parents’ apartment on Munich’s Dachauerstrasse.

In the teenager's bedroom, unlike Monday's 17-year-old axe attacker from Würzburg, they find no home-made Islamic State flag or other Islamist propaganda. Instead they find a computer filled with logs of online shooting games – username "Psycho" – and the book When Kids Kill, about school shootings.

Other material includes reports on German school shootings – and the police response – as well as on Anders Breivik who, five years earlier to the day, shot 77 mostly young people dead in Norway.

Psychic disturbance

Like his shooting spree idols, Sonboly was a troubled person with a history of depression. Hours later, Bavaria’s interior minister

Joachim Hermann

will describe him as someone with “a not inconsiderable psychic disturbance”.

At an 11am press conference on Saturday morning, police lay out how the dead man lured his victims with a fake Facebook profile in the name "Selina Akin", promising free snacks at the fast food restaurant.

Once inside, he entered the toilet and pulled from his rucksack – filled with 300 rounds – a 9mm Glock 17. He had no weapons background or gun permit and police don’t know yet how he acquired the murder weapon with the filed-off serial number. At 5.52pm, he began shooting.

“He shot one young guy in the leg so he couldn’t flee, then twice in the head, it was an execution,” said one eye-witness.

At their press conference, police say there were two main reasons why it took eight hours to master the fast-moving crisis.

First, many eyewitnesses in the shopping centre confused armed plainclothes police officers for additional gunmen. Police thought they were looking for three shooters who might have disappeared into the underground train station.

They feared a repeat of last year’s Paris attacks, with an initial strike at an external point in the city to distract police followed up by attacks in the city centre

The second reason was social media. Via Twitter and Facebook, Munich police were able to warn people to stay away from the shopping centre and to stay indoors. But social media also fanned the mass panic in Munich. With dozens of false alarms coming through each hour, police chief Hubertus Andrä decided to close down the entire public transport network in a bid to put a lid on the situation.

With thousands stranded in the city, social media came to the rescue to solve the problem it had helped create: spreading vital information from police and allowing Munich locals to open their homes to offer stranded strangers a bed for the night.

After holding out for almost 24 hours, Chancellor Angela Merkel appeared at 2.30pm on Saturday to condemn Munich's "night of horror".

“All of us . . . are mourning with heavy hearts with those who will never be able to return to their families,” she said.

On official buildings, flags are flying at half-mast and politicians are not attending any public functions.

Shocked locals

With public transport restored in the early hours of Saturday, life returned again – cautiously – to Munich city centre. At the OEZ shopping centre, shocked locals laid flowers at a barrier before the complex.

Among the crowd, ashen-faced teens who remember their classmate Sonboly as a withdrawn person.

“He was a quiet type, never said much about himself,” said one, Ismael, in front of the OEZ. “He was bullied a lot, perhaps because he worked so hard.”

Also in the crowd, numbed parents of victims, clutching pictures of their dead children. Among the dead were two 15-year-olds, three 14-year-olds, a 17-year-old and a 19-year-old, as well as a 45-year-old. No Irish were caught up in the attacks.

Naim Zabergia holds a picture of a smiling youth, his son Dijamant – nicknamed Dino.

“He hadn’t a chance, my wife can’t believe what has happened,” he says.

Three young victims had Turkish roots, one family from Kosovo lost three children. Many of the dead were a clique, say surviving members.

“We were a family, we just can’t believe it,” said one to Bavarian television.

On Facebook, where an angry teen planned his attack, the family of another remembered on Sunday: “Armela – our beloved daughter, sister, friend . . . we love you angel.”