BERLIN — The gunman killed by police in Munich fired shots at the Israeli Consulate and at a museum on the city’s Nazi-era history before the fatal shootout with officers, authorities said Friday. An official in neighboring Austria, his home country, said the man bought his gun from a weapons collector the day before the attack.
The suspect, an apparently radicalized 18-year-old Austrian with Bosnian roots who was carrying a decades-old Swiss military gun with a bayonet attached, died at the scene after the shootout on Thursday morning. German prosecutors and police said Thursday they believed he was planning to attack the consulate on the anniversary of the attack on the Israeli delegation at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
On Friday, police gave more details of the man’s movements before he was shot dead. They said he fired two shots at the front of the museum, and made his way into two nearby buildings, shooting at the window of one of them. He also tried and failed to climb over the fence of the consulate, then fired two shots at the building itself, which hit a pane of glass. He then ran into police officers, opening fire at them after they had told him to put his weapon down.
Prosecutor Gabriele Tilmann said investigators’ “working hypothesis” is that the assailant “acted out of Islamist or antisemitic motivation,” though they haven’t yet found any message from him that would help pinpoint the motive. While authorities have determined that he was a lone attacker, they are still working to determine whether he was involved with any network.
Franz Ruf, the public security director at Austria’s interior ministry, said the man’s home was searched on Thursday. Investigators seized unspecified “data carriers,” but found no weapons or Islamic State group propaganda, he told reporters in Vienna.
They also questioned the weapons collector who sold the assailant the firearm on Wednesday. Ruf said the assailant paid 400 euros ($444) for the gun and bayonet, and also bought about 50 rounds of ammunition.
The man’s parents reported him missing to Austrian police at 10 a.m. Thursday — about an hour after the shooting in Munich — after he failed to show up to the workplace where he had started a new job on Monday.
Austrian police say the assailant came to authorities’ attention in February 2023 and that, following a “dangerous threat” against fellow students coupled with bodily harm, he also was accused of involvement in a terror organization.
There was a suspicion that he had become religiously radicalized, was active online in that context and was interested in explosives and weapons, according to a police statement Thursday, but prosecutors closed an investigation in April 2023. Ruf said he had used the flag of an Islamic extremist organization in his role in online games, “and in this connection one can of course recognize a degree of radicalization.”
Authorities last year issued a ban on him owning weapons until at least the beginning of 2028, but police say he had not come to their attention since.
