According to police, the gunman killed in Munich had shot at the Israeli consulate

BERLIN — The gunman killed by police in Munich had fired shots at the Israeli consulate and a museum of the city's Nazi history before the fatal shootout with officers, authorities said Friday. An official in neighboring Austria, his home country, said the man bought his weapon from a gun 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 rifle with a fixed bayonet, died at the scene after the shooting on Thursday morning. German prosecutors and police said on Thursday they believed he had planned an attack on the consulate on the anniversary of the attack on the Israeli delegation at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

On Friday, police released more details about the man's movements before he was shot. They said he fired two shots at the front of the museum and entered two nearby buildings, shooting at the window of one of them. He also tried to climb over the consulate's fence but was unable to do so, and then fired two shots at the building itself, hitting a glass pane. He then ran into police officers and opened fire on them after they ordered him to put down his weapon.

Prosecutor Gabriele Tilmann said investigators' “working hypothesis” was that the attacker “acted out of Islamist or anti-Semitic motives,” although they have so far found no message from him that would help determine the motive. Although authorities have determined he was a lone perpetrator, they are still working to determine whether he was involved in a network.

Franz Ruf, security director at the Austrian Interior Ministry, said the man's apartment was searched on Thursday. Investigators confiscated unspecified “data storage devices” but found neither weapons nor propaganda material from the Islamic State, he told reporters in Vienna.

They also questioned the gun collector who sold the gun to the attacker on Wednesday. Ruf said the attacker 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. on Thursday – about an hour after the shooting in Munich – after he failed to show up at his workplace, where he had started a new job on Monday.

According to the Austrian police, the perpetrator was noticed in February 2023. After making a “dangerous threat” against classmates and causing bodily harm, he was also accused of membership in a terrorist organization.

There is a suspicion that he has become religiously radicalized, is active online in this context and is interested in explosives and weapons, a police statement said on Thursday; however, the public prosecutor's office closed the investigation in April 2023. Ruf said he had used the flag of an Islamist extremist organization in his role in online games, “and in this context one can of course recognize a certain radicalization.”

Last year, the authorities imposed a weapons ban on him that was to remain in effect until at least early 2028. Since then, however, he has not been noticed by the police, it is said.