On the evening of 22 July 2016, an 18-year-old gunman opened fire in and around the Olympia shopping mall in Munich's Moosach district, killing nine people before fatally shooting himself when police confronted him about two and a half hours later.
The gunman, identified as David Sonboly (born Ali Sonboly, 20 April 1998), was an Iranian-German dual national who had lived in Munich his whole life and had no prior criminal record. He created a fake Facebook profile using a girl's name and posted invitations to a nearby McDonald's, though none of the invitees came. After waiting inside the restaurant for several hours, he left a document on his laptop in the restroom, then opened fire on a group of six teenagers seated at a table, killing five and wounding one. He continued shooting as he left the restaurant, firing toward people fleeing near an electronics store and two parked cars, killing three more and wounding three others, then crossed the street into the shopping mall and fatally shot a ninth victim near the elevators. He went on to fire additional shots from a covered footbridge and the roof of a parking garage, wounding a bystander with a ricocheting fragment during a shouted exchange with a resident, and exchanged fire with a police officer who missed him. He then fled into a nearby residential area, hid in a bicycle storage room, and shot himself in the head when police confronted him there.
Nine victims died alongside the perpetrator, and 36 others were injured, four of them by gunfire. Three of the dead were women and six were men; seven were Muslim, and the victims included three Turkish nationals, two members of German Sinti families, and one member of a Kosovan Roma family.
Police initially described the attack as a "classic shooting rampage" rather than terrorism, citing Sonboly's documented obsession with mass shootings, a scrapbook of clippings on rampage killings, and a fascination with the 2011 Norway attacks — the shooting fell on the fifth anniversary of that attack. Investigators determined the weapon was a reactivated Glock 17 pistol with its serial number removed, apparently purchased through the darknet. On 25 July 2016, police arrested a 16-year-old friend of Sonboly's on suspicion of failing to report the plot in advance.
Sonboly had received psychiatric treatment for depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder, including a two-month inpatient stay in 2015, and had described years of bullying by classmates. A March 2017 joint report by Bavaria's State Office of Criminal Investigation and the public prosecutor's office concluded the attack was not political, attributing it mainly to revenge for bullying, mental illness, and an obsession with other shootings. A separate panel of political scientists commissioned by Munich City Council reported in October 2017 that xenophobia and far-right ideology were also contributing factors, citing reported anti-Turkish messages and Sonboly's self-identification with the "Aryan race." A further report in 2018 again described the attack as a non-political rampage. In October 2019, Bavarian police revised their classification, stating the attack was now considered "at least partly motivated by" Sonboly's right-wing extremist views. An early, uncorroborated witness account that the gunman shouted "Allahu Akbar" was not confirmed by police or by other witnesses.
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