Munich shooting: killer was bullied teen loner obsessed with mass murder

MUNICH. KAZINFORM - The German 18-year-old who killed nine people at a Munich shopping centre on Friday night was obsessed with mass killings, owned a book on US school shootings and played computer shooting games, The Guardian reports.
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Most of his victims were fellow teenagers, five of them under 16. The loss of so many young people added to the depth of mourning in Germany, where people are struggling to understand how a shy student managed to acquire a gun and bullets and then turn them on his peers in cold blood.

The attacker, named as Ali Sonboly, was the son of Iranian refugees who came to Germany in the 1990s. Neighbours said he was shy and withdrawn and showed no signs of the violence that had apparently preoccupied him long before Friday night. A police search of the gunman's family home, part of a social housing block in the prosperous Maxvorstadt district, found newspaper clippings and books related to mass murders, among them one called Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters.

"[He] was obsessed with shooting rampages," Munich's police chief, Hubertus Andrae, said. Sonboly also seems to have been interested in the far-right terroristAnders Breivik, who murdered 77 mostly young people in a killing spree across Oslo and an island camp. The Munich attack came on the fifth anniversary of the Norwegian slaughter. A classmate told Germany's Bild newspaper that Sonboly used Breivik's face as his profile picture on the WhatsApp messaging service.

Sonboly apparently tried to lure his victims to the site of the massacre with a bizarre message on a hacked Facebook page, promising free meals to anyone at the restaurant at 4pm. It was a venue the gunman knew, police believe, and he may have recognised victims, although he did not begin shooting until two hours after the Facebook invitation.

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