Munich // The shooting attack at a Munich shopping centre that left nine people dead was carried out by German-Iranian teenager who later killed himself and was probably acting alone, police said.
“The perpetrator was an 18-year-old German-Iranian from Munich,” police chief Hubertus Andrae said, adding that he had no criminal record.
“The motive or explanation for this crime is completely unclear,” he said.
The third attack on civilians in Europe in just over a week sent panicked shoppers fleeing the mall in Germany’s third largest city as elite police launched a massive operation to track down what had initially been thought to be up to three assailants.
German chancellor Angela Merkel has called a meeting of her security council after the shooting, which came just days after an axe rampage on a train in the same German state of Bavaria and just over a week after a lorry attack in the French Riviera city of Nice that killed 84 people.
Armed with a handgun, the teenager opened fire at a McDonald’s restaurant on Friday evening and continued in the street before entering the mall, killing nine people and wounding 16, according to the latest toll.
Mr Andrae said there were young people among the dead and that some of the injured were children.
A police patrol shot and wounded the gunman but he managed to escape, he said.
The attacker’s body was later found about one kilometre from the mall, German DPA news agency reported.
“We found a man who killed himself. We assume that he was the only shooter,” police said.
A video posted on social media appeared to show a man dressed in black walking away from a McDonald’s while firing repeatedly on people as they fled screaming.
Shoppers rushed away from the mall, some carrying children in their arms, as the building was surrounded by armed police and emergency vehicles, while helicopters buzzed overhead.
Survivors described terrifying scenes.
“We entered McDonald’s to eat ... then there was panic, and people ran out,” one woman told Bavarian public television. She said she heard three gunshots, “children were crying, people rushed to the exit in panic”.
Police initially believed there could be up to three assailants.
But Mr Andrae said that two others who had been thought to be linked had “absolutely nothing to do” with the attack and were simply fleeing the scene.
Munich’s main train station was evacuated and metro and bus services in the city suspended for several hours while residents were ordered to stay indoors, leaving the streets largely deserted.
By early Saturday, transport services were running again.
“We are determined to do everything we can so that terror and inhuman violence stand no chance in Germany,” Ms Merkel’s chief of staff Peter Altmaier said.
German president Joachim Gauck said he was horrified by the “murderous attack” at the mall, while the US president Barack Obama and his French counterpart Francois Hollande voiced support for their close ally.
“Germany’s one of our closest allies, so we are going to pledge all the support that they may need in dealing with these circumstances,” Mr Obama said.
Austria said it had “significantly” tightened security measures in states sharing a border with Germany and put its elite Cobra police force on high alert.
The attack after a teenage asylum seeker went on a rampage with an axe and a knife on a train on Monday near Wuerzburg, also in Bavaria, injuring five people.
Interior minister Thomas de Maiziere has said the train attacker was believed to be a “lone wolf” who appeared to have been “inspired” by ISIL but was not a member of the extremist group.
That rampage triggered calls by politicians in Bavaria to impose an upper limit on the number of refugees coming into Germany, which accepted a record 1.1 million migrants and refugees last year.
The Munich mall is near the stadium for the 1972 Olympics and the athletes’ village which was the site of the hostage-taking and massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by the Palestinian Black September group during the Games.
The shooting coincided with the fifth anniversary of the massacre of 77 people in Norway by right-wing fanatic Anders Behring Breivik.
Europe has been on alert for terrorism after a string of attacks in neighbouring France and Belgium claimed by ISIL.
The mall shooting occurred just eight days after 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel used a lorry to mow down 84 people, including children, after a Bastille Day fireworks display in Nice, the third major attack on French soil in the past 18 months.
In March, ISIL claimed suicide bombings at Brussels airport and a city metro station that left 32 people dead.
In May, a mentally unstable 27-year-old man carried out a knife attack on a regional train in Bavaria, killing one person and injuring three others.
* Agence France-Presse
