Munich Shooter: 18-year-old German-Iranian

MUNICH — A gunman carried out a shooting rampage Friday in a busy shopping area of Munich, killing at least nine people and wounding several others in an act of “suspected terrorism” before he committed suicide, police said early Saturday.

The rampage prompted authorities to lock down the southern German city and launch a massive manhunt for suspected perpetrators. Police later determined that the attack at Munich’s Olympia shopping complex was apparently carried out by a lone gunman and that he committed suicide about half a mile away.

[Map: Where the Munich mall shooting happened View Graphic ]

There were no immediate details about the victims of what a police spokesman said “looks like a terrorist attack.” The Associated Press quoted Munich police spokesman Peter Beck as saying 10 people were killed in total, including the shooter.

In the absence of information about the identities of the dead and injured, about 50 family members of various ethnic backgrounds gathered at a Munich sports hall early Saturday to await official word on the fate of missing loved ones.

Much of the city was placed on lockdown as police conducted their manhunt. Despite initial reports of multiple attack sites, police could not confirm attacks in any other locations besides the shopping area.

Officials did not immediately specify how the attack unfolded or describe the full scope of the bloodshed at the Olympia mall.

But a senior security official told The Washington Post that four people were killed inside a McDonald’s restaurant and one was fatally shot outside. The official said another victim died at a hospital.

The initial investigation was pointing “in all directions,” police spokesman Marcus de Gloria Martins told reporters in Munich.

German officials said investigators were looking into the possibility that the attack might have been motivated by anti-immigrant sentiments, as well as the prospect that Islamist extremism was behind it. Language against foreigners can be heard on a recording from the scene of the shooting, but it was not immediately clear who was speaking. A German television station said a witness told a colleague that the shooter shouted “Bloody foreigners!” at the scene of the McDonald’s attack. There was no immediate confirmation of that account.

German news media reported that police found a body, possibly that of the McDonald’s shooter, about a half mile from the scene and were checking a backpack for explosives.

Hours after the attack, Martins said police were still assuming that “up to three perpetrators” were involved. “We’re definitely not assuming that it’s more than three, but it might also be that it’s fewer than that,” he said. Read the rest of this entry »