MUNICH: The teenager who shot dead nine people in a gun rampage in Munich was “obsessed” with mass killers like Norwegian rightwing fanatic Anders Behring Breivik and had no links to the militant Islamic State (IS) group, police said on Saturday.

Europe reacted in shock to the third attack on the continent in just over a week, after 18-year-old David Ali Sonboly went on a shooting spree at a shopping centre on Friday evening before turning the gun on himself.

Officials said Sonboly, a German-Iranian student, had a history of mental illness.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said the teenager had likely hacked a girl’s Facebook account and used it to lure victims to the McDonald’s outlet where he began his rampage.

“There is absolutely no link to the Islamic State,” Munich police chief Huber­tus Andrae said, describing the assault as a “classic act by a deranged person”.

Investigators saw an “obvious link” between Friday’s killings and Breivik’s massacre of 77 people in Norway exactly five years earlier, Andrae added.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, in her first reaction to the carnage, said Munich had suffered a “night of horror”.

Most of the victims in Friday’s attack were young people, with three aged just 14, police said.

Published in Dawn, July 24th, 2016