A mass shooting in Munich

FOR many months, as terrorist attacks have plagued France and Belgium, observers have wondered why Germany had not yet been affected. Now, in just the past week, two attacks have struck Bavaria. On July 22nd an 18-year-old with German and Iranian citizenship opened fire at a shopping mall in Munich, killing at least nine people before apparently committing suicide. Police say the shooter was a high-school student who suffered from depression.

Four days earlier a 17-year-old Afghan refugee wielding an axe and a knife attacked passengers on a train near Würzburg, injuring five people before being shot dead by police. The train attacker appears to have been influenced by Islamic State (IS) propaganda.

The bloodshed in Munich began shortly after 5pm, when gunshots and casualties were reported inside the Olympia shopping mall in the city’s northern district of Moosach. At 5.50pm, several witnesses reported shots fired at a McDonald’s franchise in a nearby street. The attacker, armed with a pistol, encountered a plain-clothes police patrol which fired at him but then lost sight of him, said Munich’s police chief, Hubertus Andrä.

Based on eyewitness reports, police were initially hunting as many as three attackers believed to be at large in the city. The public transport system was shut down and the main train station evacuated, leaving thousands of passengers stranded. Police asked Munich residents to stay at home while the manhunt was underway and to refrain from posting videos and rumours on the internet. According to Mr Andrä, two suspects seen fleeing the Olympia shopping centre were later discovered to have played no role in the assault.

By 8.30pm it was all over. The gunman, a Munich resident who had had no previous contact with police, was found dead near the mall. Besides the ten dead (including the killer), there were 16 wounded, including several children; the lives of three of the injured remain in danger. In a press conference the following day, police said the perpetrator had been psychologically ill, and had no connection to IS or any other terrorist organisation. Books and newspaper articles about mass shootings were found at his home. He had obtained his Glock pistol, and substantial amounts of ammunition, illegally.

The gunman was not an asylum-seeker, or even an immigrant: he was born and raised in Munich, police said. Indeed, neither of the two attacks this week had any clear connection to Islamist terror groups. Yet they have reopened Germany’s tense debate over Muslim immigration and the decision last year to admit some 1.1m asylum-seekers, which in previous months seemed to have died down. After the axe attack in Würzburg, anti-immigration activists criticised Germany’s interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, for emphasising that the perpetrator’s links to IS had been tenuous. Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, was due to hold a crisis meeting of her ministers at midday in Berlin. They will have the difficult task of reassuring the country in the face of an unpredictable threat of violence.