Police find traces of blood – 18-year-old drank in the Nazi center

The Munich attacker fired a total of nine shots during the attack on the Israeli consulate general. This was stated by police operations manager Christian Huber in Munich. Several shots were fired at buildings, and others at police officers. The magazine of the weapon, a decades-old Swiss army weapon, held six cartridges. A pack containing 50 rounds of ammunition was found in the 18-year-old’s car and was quickly emptied. The whereabouts of the rest of the ammunition is still the subject of investigations. A police officer and a passer-by each suffered acoustic trauma, and there were no other injuries.

The Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office and the police assume “that this was a terrorist attack with a connection to the Consulate General of the State of Israel.” According to Huber, the weapon was an old carbine with “massive penetrating power.” The weapon was “not a decorative weapon.” The attacker, who was shot by the police, was killed by the police before the fatal exchange of fire to force him to put down his weapon. The attacker had previously fired shots at the Nazi Documentation Center in Munich and at the Russian Consulate General. The 18-year-old also gained access to at least two buildings.

After the suspected terrorist attack in Munich, investigators are looking into evidence of an Islamist or anti-Semitic motive on the part of the perpetrator. Based on the information available so far, this is the “working hypothesis,” said Gabriele Tilmann, head of the Central Office for Combating Extremism and Terrorism at the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office. Messages from the perpetrator with evidence of a motive have not yet been found.

The basis for this working hypothesis is, on the one hand, the findings of Austrian authorities, according to which the 18-year-old had become radicalized in an Islamist manner, said Tilmann. On the other hand, the crime scene and the time indicated that the perpetrator shot at the Nazi Documentation Center and the Russian General Consulate on the anniversary of the Olympic attack in 1972.

There are no indications of accomplices so far. “However, it must be determined whether the 18-year-old Austrian was involved in any kind of network,” said Tilmann.

No evidence of radicalization

According to the Salzburg public prosecutor’s office, despite investigations, there was still no evidence of radicalization or Islamist propaganda against the shooter. As the authority announced the day after the foiled attack on the Jewish Consulate General in Munich, the 18-year-old Austrian had not moved in Islamist circles in the past. The Austrian with Bosnian roots was shot dead by the police on Thursday.

According to the public prosecutor’s office, there was suspicion that the shooter killed on Thursday had threatened fellow students, allegedly causing bodily harm. Further suspicions were that he was interested in instructions on how to build bombs and may have been involved in a terrorist organization by depicting Islamist violence in an online game. These allegations relate to the period from 2021 to 2023.

Investigators therefore searched the youth’s home in the Salzburg region and confiscated the data storage device. However, no relevant material was found on his mobile phone, the justice authorities reported. They discovered three videos from a computer game on his PC that the then 14-year-old had recorded. They show scenes with Islamist content. Symbols of the Islamist group HTS were only visible on one of these videos, it was said.

No evidence was found that the videos had been distributed. Playing such a computer game and recreating Islamist scenes of violence did not constitute participation in a terrorist organization, it was said.

Investigations into the suspect’s environment also gave no indication that the accused moved in radical Islamic circles or lived a very religious life. According to the public prosecutor’s office, the young person lived “with relatively few social contacts”. No other objects or data relating to the Islamic State or bombs were found either. The investigation was therefore discontinued in April 2023.

Reports of contacts with Islamist militia

The news agency dpa had previously reported, citing security sources, that the youth had links to the Islamist group HTS. HTS stands for “Hayat Tahrir al-Sham,” a militant Islamist militia.

The Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Constitution writes that HTS emerged in 2017 from the merger of a former Al-Qaeda offshoot and several smaller militant Syrian groups. Unlike Al-Qaeda, which is planning further attacks in the West, HTS is concentrating on Syria and wants to overthrow the country’s ruler Bashar al-Assad.

The Bavarian police had no information about the shooter

The Bavarian police previously said they had no information about the dead shooter. A query of the databases on him was negative, said a spokesman for the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office (LKA). “We had no documents on him.”

In his home country of Austria, the police had imposed a weapons ban on the 18-year-olds following investigations into possible religious radicalization, which would have remained in force until at least the beginning of 2028, according to Salzburg police.