#Munich killer lured teens with promise of free burgers

Naim Zabergja holds photo of his son Dijamant who was killed after an 18-year-old opened fire on several teenagers with a semi-automatic pistol near a busy shopping mall. Picture: Daniel Karmann/ Karl-Josef Hildenbrand

Naim Zabergja holds photo of his son Dijamant who was killed after an 18-year-old opened fire on several teenagers with a semi-automatic pistol near a busy shopping mall. Picture: Daniel Karmann/ Karl-Josef Hildenbrand

Published Jul 24, 2016

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London - The tormented teenager who massacred nine people in Munich lured his teenage victims to their deaths using a bogus Facebook message, it emerged on Friday night.

Ali David Sonboly, a student obsessed by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, hacked into the account of an innocent Turkish girl and offered her friends free McDonald’s food if they came to the shopping mall.

But the youngsters answering the invitation ended up running for their lives, as the disturbed 18-year-old opened fire on them with a semi-automatic pistol.

Sonboly used Selina Akim’s account to offer the girl’s friends: “Come today at 4pm to Meggi [slang for McDonald’s] at the OEZ [shopping mall]! I will buy you what you want, but nothing too expensive.”

Whether he knew the girl or any of his victims was not clear last night, but Sonboly’s careful planning was obvious. His obsession with Nazi terrorist Breivik, drove him to emulate the bloody carnage of Oslo and Utoya island, exactly five years on.

Of the nine killed in the horrific shooting spree, seven were teenagers, the youngest aged just 14. Another 27 more were wounded - ten of those were fighting for their lives on Friday night.

As the young faces of Sonboly’s victims began to appear in the media, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany mourned “with a heavy heart”.

Among the victims were three Turks, a nationality German-Iranian Sonboly appeared to harbour particular resentment towards, and three Kosovans.

Friends Armela Segashi and Sabina Sulaj, both 14, died at the scene after Sonboly burst out of the McDonald’s and began shooting.

The girls’ families were originally from Kosovo, and are believed to have fled the Balkan wars in the late 1990s.

Pictures posted on the internet showed them to be typical teenagers, posting selfies and socialising with friends.

After she didn’t come home from the mall, Armela’s worried brother asked friends online to help him find his little sister, saying she had been at the shopping centre and the family had not heard from her since news of the shooting broke.

But at 8am on Saturday, he broke the terrible news on Facebook: “Armela our beloved daughter, sister, friend and first of all beloved human being today lost her life in the shooting in Munich. We love you, angel.”

Another victim was named by friends on Saturday as Kollmann, 18, a college student and keen amateur footballer, who lived less than 500 yards from where he died.

Postman Huseyin Bayri told The Mail on Sunday of the moment he died in his arms.

Mr Bayri was cycling home from work when the shooting began. “All of a sudden I saw this man standing in the street with a gun firing at people in front of me,” he said.

“There was panic and everyone was running away. I saw the boy in front of me, he had been shot in the back. He was crying out to me telling me “Please help me, call an ambulance.”

“I went to his side and I was saying, ‘It’s OK, you’ll be OK’ but just after I said that he took his last breath right in front of me. I stayed next to him talking to him and checking his pulse but there was nothing. He was dead.

A friend, Fatih Ozdemir, 20, said: “He had been eating in the McDonald’s with another friend and they were just leaving when the shooting started. He took two shots in the back. He didn’t stand a chance. But the other friend got away.

“He was one of my best friends. He always had a smile on his face and he loved life. Now he is gone and we are all shocked and can not believe what has happened.’.”

The other Kosovan to be killed was Dijamant Zabergja, 21, the only son of a police officer who worked as an apprentice at Munich airport. He was having a drink with friends at the mall when he was murdered.

His father Naim Zabergja proudly held a picture of his son as he said: “His friend called me. He said they had bought some drinks and wanted to sit outside. The gunman was just two metres away from him. The police came to us in the middle of the night. Fortunately his friend managed to flee but my son was shot dead.

“I’m living as if in a nightmare. I still can not believe what has happened. Everyone in our family cannot believe this.”

The Turkish victims were named as Sevda Dag, said to be 45 years old, and Can Leyla and Selcuk Kilic, both 15 and said to be “very good friends” . They were members of a Thai boxing club.

A friend said: “They were such good guys, no person deserves what happened to them.”

Another victim was named in Turkish media last night as 17-year-old Huseyin Dayicik, who was said to be from Turkey, but was a Greek citizen. And the final victim was named as Roberto Rafael, thought to be 14, and described as being “worth his weight in gold”.

GRAPHIC VIDEO

 

Video captures chilling moment gunman fires TWENTY times at shoppers in #Munich https://t.co/e9l1FkIb9Q pic.twitter.com/gQpniSNBeI

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) July 22, 2016

 

Investigators were on Friday night piecing together what motivated Sonboly and how he obtained such a lethal weapon, a Glock 9mm pistol, despite strict gun laws in Germany,

Detectives ruled out a link to Islamic extremism, and said Sonboly had a history of mental illness. It was suggested the violence could have been a revenge attack after years of bullying.

He also appeared obsessed with mass killings. Police discovered a book on the US shooting sprees at Colombine and Virginia Tech and newspaper cuttings about similar incidents.

He also posted a photo of Breivik on his WhatsApp account on the morning of the killing.

Sonboly was also addicted to computer games and had threatened to murder friends before, vowing “I will kill you all” in a chat room. Whatever drove him, Sonboly’s murderous spree began at 5.50pm local time when he burst into the toilet of the McDonald’s in the mall in the northern Munich suburb of Moosach and began firing. Police confirmed he shot many victims at point blank range.

As terrified customers ran from the restaurant, Sonboly was seen running out of the front door after them, then firing at people in the street before crossing the road to the Olympia Einkaufszentrum shopping centre (OEZ) and firing more rounds from his Glock 17 pistol. Police said he had more than 300 bullets in his backpack.

After shooting in the shopping mall, Sonboly fled on to the roof of an adjacent car park where a bizarre exchange ensued with a man overlooking it from his high-rise flat, all caught on mobile phone footage.

Digger driver Thomas Salbey, 57, was sitting on his balcony when he heard the sharp cracks of the Glock.

“I had drunk an end of the day beer when I heard the shots,” he said.

“Bam, bam, bam, that’s what they sounded like.

“It was right beneath my building. I thought it was a Kalashnikov. I looked from the balcony to the area below and saw this guy moving through a glassed off area. I saw him reloading his pistol.

“I threw my beer bottle at him. It smashed on the glass roof but I don’t think he heard it.”

Salbey yelled out that he was an “a***hole’ and “You are not all there!”

“I am German!” yelled the gunman in reply.

Bullet marks near to the stonework on Salbey’s balcony testify to the fact that Sonboly opened fire in his direction.

He called the police but they didn’t know where Sonboly was. “I directed them to the roof of the parking garage,” he said. “I wasn’t afraid I didn’t know then if his gun was real or a starting pistol.”

There followed an abusive shouted trade of insults between the digger driver and the killer in which Mr Salbey branded him once more an “a***hole” and a “w*****.”

Sonboly answered him in perfect German; “Now I must buy a weapon to bring you...” the sentence was not finished.

At one point Sonboly revealed his contempt for the Turks he blamed for his school-day miseries by branding Bavarian-born Salbey a “s*** Turk.”

There followed the sharp report of more pistol shots before Sonboly moved off to take his own life.

“The link with Breivik is obvious,” said Munich police chief Hubertus Andrae as a stunned nation felt relief that this was not an act of Islamist terror, yet anguish at the senseless loss of young innocent life.

Grieving relatives, friends and hundreds of mourners gathered at the scene of the atrocity throughout Saturday to lay flowers and light candles.

It was confirmed Sonboly had illegally filed off the serial number of the weapon to prevent police from identifying where he obtained it from.

The Glock 17 has a standard 17-round magazine holding 9mm bullets. The gun is used by police forces in more than 30 countries.

 

Police search inside mall for #Munich shooter https://t.co/J05dVUIqpW pic.twitter.com/F4Py3xjwTP

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) July 22, 2016

 

Early on Saturday morning, police raided the five-room home where he lived with his parents and his 14-year-old younger brother Daniel, which the family rented for £1 500 (about R28 000) a month.

One book in his library was Why Kids Kill, about the US massacres, while pile of paperwork concerned the 2009 massacre in the town of Winnenden in the state of Baden-Wuertemmberg, next door to Bavaria.

In that incident, teenager Tim Kretschmer avenged himself on teachers and pupils he felt had slighted him. When he was finished 15 pupils and staff members lay dead: he ended his own life with the weapon he had used to kill them. Police said Sonboly “admired” the killings of Kretschmer.

Yet another file contained cuttings on the Erfurt massacre of April 2002 when 19-year-old Robert Steinhauser took revenge on his school teacher and former classmates, killing 13 teachers, two pupils and a policeman before committing suicide.

Sonboly was born in Germany to parents who fled Iran in the 1990s. His father Masoud operated a luxury taxi service with a BMW Series 7 limousine that he washed and waxed every weekend, and his mother worked on a till at the city’s Karstadt department store.

He struggled at school, leaving without academic qualifications in a nation that prides itself on technical excellence, seemingly doomed to a life of shelf-stacking or floor-washing.

He complained of bullying by “Turkish and Arabic” schoolmates as being the reason for his poor educational record. He began to retreat ever deeper into a fantasy world online.

Over time these fantasies were fuelled by violent video games he played on sites where he gave himself nicknames like “Psycho” and “God Like.”

One of these gaming sites called Steam banned him as his temper grew increasingly volatile and he began to insult fellow gamers. In the cyber world, he was abusive and threatening: in the real one he began to receive psychiatric therapy to battle his demons.

Beneath the home which he would never return to, cafe owner Stephan Baumann said: “I wouldn’t have ever thought he was the kind of guy who would have had the underworld connections to get a gun.

“He was a troubled looking young man. But I would never have marked him down as being capable of something like this, that’s for sure.”

Daily Mail

 

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