BERLIN—A gunman opened fire at a busy shopping mall in Munich on Friday evening, killing nine people and injuring 20 others in what the police were investigating as a possible act of terrorism.
The police sealed off parts of the city, Germany’s third largest, for hours and pleaded with its 1.4 million residents to remain indoors as they attempted to determine who was responsible for the attack.
The transit system was shut down, sirens wailed and helicopters clattered overhead as local authorities declared a state of emergency.
Witnesses reported seeing as many as three shooters in and around the Olympia shopping center. But the police said they had found the body of the assailant about half a-mile away and he appeared to have acted alone.
Munich police chief Hubertus Andrae told reporters the suspect was an 18-year-old German-Iranian living in Munich. “The motive or explanation for this crime is completely unclear,” he said.
Early Saturday, the police issued a cautious all-clear.
It was the latest in a series of incidents of mass violence in Europe, and the second in Germany this week.
The attack in Munich started shortly before 6 p.m. on Friday at a McDonald’s restaurant across from the mall, the police and witnesses said.
A witness told CNN that her young son saw a man loading a gun in a restroom inside the fast-food outlet before he started shooting at diners.
“He was killing the children,” said the woman, who was not identified. There was blood everywhere, she said.
Another woman described the chaos inside the restaurant.
“We’d just sat down and started eating,” she told Germany’s Bayerische Rundfunk TV. “The workers bolted out; the children started crying and ran around in panic.”
The gunman then ran into the street, witnesses said.
A video shared on social media appeared to show a man dressed in black shooting at people outside the restaurant with a handgun. Another video showed a gunman firing from the roof of a nearby parking structure. There were also reports of shooting inside the mall.
At least 10 people were killed, including the gunman, the police said.
In the initial confusion, there were reports of shootings at other locations in the city, but the police said they appeared to be false alarms.
Munich residents described a ghostly silence in the normally bustling city center on Friday night, a time when pubs and restaurants are usually filled with people ringing in the start of the weekend.
In Washington President Barack Obama said the US was ready to offer any assistance needed to investigate the attack.
“Germany is one of our closest allies,” he told reporters.
The incident was sure to provide fresh ammunition for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s claims that the world is facing a substantially greater risk of terrorism demanding an aggressive response.
Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, said in a tweet: “We stand with our friends in Germany as they work to bring those responsible to justice.”
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, and while authorities said they were investigating it as a terrorist attack, analysts pointed out that the bloodshed could have been an act of domestic violence inspired by anti-immigrant sentiment rather than Islamist extremists.
The government of Chancellor Angela Merkel has faced a strong backlash for offering asylum to hundreds of thousands of refugees in Germany, many of them from war-torn Syria.
The latest wave of Islamist violence across Europe has provided ammunition to those who claim it is impossible to safely assimilate so many newcomers.
On Monday a 17-year-old Afghan man attacked passengers on a train with an ax and a knife near the German city of Wuerzburg before being shot and killed by police. No one died in that attack, though one passenger remains in critical condition.
The extremist Islamic State (IS) group claimed responsibility, releasing a video in which the purported assailant describes himself as “a soldier of the caliphate.” But authorities have said the teen likely acted alone.
On July 14, 84 people were killed and more than 300 others injured when a 19-ton cargo truck was driven into a crowd along the waterfront in the southern France resort town of Nice.
IS said one of its “soldiers” also carried out that attack. The driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, was killed by the police at the scene.
Merkel’s chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, said authorities weren’t ruling out any possible motives for Friday’s attack.
“There’s no clarity so far. I’d urge us all to wait for the investigation,” Altmaier told the German public broadcaster, ARD.
In the video showing a gunman on the roof of the parking garage, the assailant can be heard saying in flawless German: “I’m a German, just like you.”
“You’re a jerk,” a voice is heard shouting at the gunman.
“I’m fed up with it all,” the gunman replies.
That led terrorism analyst Georg Mascolo to suggest it was possible that the attack was the work of a right-wing extremist. The shootings occurred on the fourth anniversary of the attack in Norway by Anders Behring Brevik, which killed 77 people.
Los Angeles Times/TNS
Image credits: AP