Police seize electronic devices from home of Munich shooter; no IS propaganda found
Police shoot dead Austrian, 18, who used rifle with a bayonet attached in ‘assumed terror attack’ on consulate; local reports suggest he was known to authorities as an Islamist
VIENNA, Austria — Investigators seized electronic devices at the home of a young Austrian who fired shots near Israel’s Munich consulate, but found no weapons or Islamic State group propaganda material, authorities said Friday.
German police shot dead the 18-year-old man on Thursday when he fired a vintage rifle at them near the diplomatic building. There were no other casualties.
They said they were treating it as a “terrorist attack,” apparently timed to coincide with the 52nd anniversary of the killings of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games.
Authorities raided the gunman’s home in the Salzburg region, seizing electronic data carriers, Austria’s top security chief Franz Ruf told a press conference in Vienna on Friday. He had recently traveled to Germany.
During the raid, “no weapons or IS propaganda” material were found, Ruf added.
Despite being subject to a ban on owning and carrying weapons, the man managed to purchase a vintage carbine rifle fitted with a bayonet with around “fifty rounds of ammunition” for 400 euros ($445) the day before the attack, Ruf said.
He opened fire at around 9:00 a.m. near the Israeli consulate, sparking a mobilization of about 500 police in downtown Munich. Five officers were at the scene when the shooting occurred.
At a separate press conference in Munich, prosecutor Gabriele Tilmann said investigators were combing through the gunman’s electronic data but had yet to find conclusive evidence of his motive.
But the “working hypothesis” was that “the perpetrator acted out of Islamist or antisemitic motivation,” she told reporters.
Austrian police said on Thursday that the gunman, who had Bosnian roots, had previously been investigated on suspicion of links to terrorism.
Investigators last year found three videos he had recorded in 2021, showing scenes from a computer game “with Islamist content,” prosecutors said in a statement.
In one of them the suspect had used an avatar with a flag of the “al-Nusra Front,” a jihadist group active in Syria, said Ruf.
But the investigation was dropped in 2023 as there were no indications that he was active in “radical” circles, prosecutors said.
“The mere playing of a computer game or the re-enactment of violent Islamist scenes was not sufficient to prove intent to commit the offense,” they clarified.
Some media have suggested, however, that because the consulate is located very close to the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, which is located on the site of the former Nazi party headquarters, the museum may have therefore been the potential target.
Nevertheless, State Interior Minister Joachim Herrman said at a press conference afterward that German authorities are treating the shooting as a “possible attack on an Israeli institution,” and German police said in a later statement that they were assuming the man was planning “a terrorist attack” on the consulate.
“It is assumed to be a terrorist attack involving the Consulate General of the State of Israel,” Bavaria state police and prosecutors said in a joint statement.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Thursday that “antisemitism and Islamism have no place here,” adding in a post on X that “the quick reaction of the emergency services in Munich may have prevented something terrible from happening today.”
