Following the deadly attack in Munich that left 10 dead, including the gunman, police have been searching for a motive for what lead the 18-year-old German-Iranian to go on the shooting rampage.
The shooter has been identified by media as Ali David Sonboly.
A spokesman for the Munich prosecutors’ office said there is still no evidence of any political motivation to the crime, nor that the shooter killed specific victims.
But now, a picture is finally emerging of the troubled teenager. He was depressed, undergoing psychiatric treatment and held a hatred for foreigners. Police have also found evidence of what looks like an obsession with mass shootings.
READ MORE: Munich shooting suspect was ‘obsessed’ with mass shootings, police say
Bavarian investigators say he spent more than a year preparing for the attack.
Investigator Robert Heimberger told the Associated Press Sonboly also visited the site of a previous school shooting in the German town of Winnenden and took photographs.
He said the shooter, who likely got his illegal weapon through the internet’s “dark net” market, was an avid player of first-person shooter video games, including “Counter-Strike: Source.”
A large amount of literature was also found in the man’s apartment showing he had extensively researched school shootings and the killing of 77 people, mostly children, by Norwegian right-wing extremist Anders Breivik. Police have since speculated the shooting in Munich was in fact a copy-cat attack, as it came on the fifth anniversary of Breivik’s massacre.
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A German-language translation of the book by Peter Langman, “Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters”, was also found.
When Langman heard that his book was discovered in the killer’s apartment he told Global News it was “distressing to say the least.”
“I don’t know why he had the book,” Langman said.
“It’s possible he saw disturbing things in his own mind that he wanted to better understand, and he was looking for insight. On the other hand he might have been looking for role models to imitate.”
Langman, a Pennsylvania-based psychologist and expert on school shootings, said this search for role models is especially common in younger attackers.
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“Based on on my research it’s the adolescent shooters who are more likely to have role models, to find external influences to copy,” he said.
“It does look like he was studying mass killers…the fact that the attack was on the fifth anniversary of Breivik’s massacre does suggest that he was using Breivik as a role model.”
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Many of the victims in the Munich shooting were young people, possibly lured to the location by a message posted online promising free food at the McDonalds where the shooting took place. Langman said another motivating factor among mass shooters, especially younger ones, is envy.
“It’s possible he was going after teens, because another possibility we see in many school shooters is that the perpetrators kill those they envy,” Langman said.
“If he was alone and miserable and he saw teens around him happy and socially successful, that envy could have turned into hatred and rage.”
Langman stresses that it is impossible to fully understand what was going through the mind of the shooter in Munich, saying that mass killings like this are never the result of one thing but are always “the combination of multiple factors.”
With files from the Associated Press
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