2024-09-05 18:54:10
In the center of Munich, not far from the Israeli Consulate General, today the police shot dead an 18-year-old Austrian who had fired at them several times before. The police are investigating the case as an attempt to commit a terrorist attack, specifically in connection with the Israeli embassy.
Police in the Austrian state of Salzburg, where the young man came from, said authorities had previously investigated him on suspicion of religious radicalization and an interest in weapons and explosives. He was accused of participating in a terrorist organization. According to the APA agency, investigators found propaganda materials of the terrorist organization Islamic State in his phone. Last spring, however, the public prosecutor’s office stopped the investigation. A man with Bosnian roots was banned from holding weapons.
Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann already admitted at the afternoon press conference that the target of the planned attack was to be the Israeli Consulate General. The Documentation Center for the History of Nazism and the American House cultural institute are also located near the site of the incident. Munich police and the public prosecutor’s office, which deals with the most serious crimes, later said they were investigating the case as an attempted terrorist attack and assumed “a connection with the Consulate General of the State of Israel.”
Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder hinted at the connection with Thursday’s anniversary of the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes and members of the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Munich Summer Games. The consulate general was closed on Thursday precisely because of the anniversary. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the DPA agency shortly after the crime that nothing happened to any of its employees.
The police informed about the closure of the area in the north-western part of the center of Munich shortly after 9:00. It closed off a wide area, with five hundred police officers on the scene. None of the five police officers who were on the scene at the time of the shooting or any other bystanders were injured. Munich police said the gunman had a “repeating weapon of an older production date”.
Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann confirmed the suspect’s death this morning. According to him, he probably died at the scene of the shootout. The Austrian authorities have tightened security measures after the shooting at the consulate, the Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner announced according to the DPA agency.
The police are now investigating the shooting as an attempted terrorist attack. The Munich police and the General Prosecutor’s Office, which deals with the most serious crimes, informed about this on Thursday afternoon.
Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog, his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinemeier and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz condemned the act.
“The protection of Jewish and Israeli facilities is, as you know, the highest priority,” said German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser shortly after the incident. Bavarian Prime Minister Söder also expressed the same opinion.
“I say clearly: Anti-Semitism and Islamism have no place here,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wrote on the X social network. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who is on a tour of the Middle East, said that “as a society we stand against all extremism, no matter where it comes from”.
According to information from Thursday morning, many police officers were still on alert in the vicinity of the Documentation Center for the History of Nazism and the Israeli Consulate General, and a helicopter was flying over the area. Police urged the public to avoid the area.
A spokesman for the Munich police publicly confirmed media reports that the shot man is an 18-year-old Austrian citizen who was known to the authorities as an Islamist in the past. However, he did not want to comment on the motive of his act. According to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Austrian magazine Profil, the Salzburg State Office for the Protection of the Constitution was also on the lookout for the young man. The Austrian was allegedly a supporter of the Syrian Conquest Front (formerly An-Nusra) terrorist group.
Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder linked the act to the anniversary of the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes and members of the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Munich Summer Games. Munich commemorates the anniversary of the event on Thursday.
Palestinian terrorists from the Black September organization took the Israeli Olympic team hostage in an attack on the 1972 Games. During the twenty-hour drama, eleven Israeli athletes were shot dead in the Olympic village, and one German policeman and five of the eight terrorists also died in a confusing situation at the nearby Munich airport Fürstenfeldbruck. The Summer Olympics in Munich continued even after the attacks.
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