Gunman shot outside Israeli Consulate in Munich was devout 18-year-old Muslim

A teenage gunman who was shot dead outside the Israeli Consulate has been identified as an Austrian national who was already known to authorities as a suspected Islamist

Police said the suspect, 18, fired shots from an old carbine rifle with a bayonet in Munich’s Maxvorstadt district, near the consulate and a Nazi history museum, before being killed in a shootout with five officers.

The incident occurred on the anniversary of the 1972 attack at the Munich Olympics in which Palestinian militants murdered 11 Israeli athletes.

Bavarian state Premier Markus Soeder told reporters: “There may be a connection between the two” adding that it would be investigated.

A Munich police spokesman said the teenager was an Austrian citizen thought to be a resident in Austria, without giving further details.

He had recently travelled to Germany and lived in Austria’s Salzburg area, Austria’s Standard newspaper and Germany’s Spiegel news outlet reported.

Local media reports the young man is said to have appeared at school as a devout Muslim and to have gotten into arguments with other students on several occasions. He is also said to have expressed violent fantasies.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry said its Munich Consulate was closed on Thursday for a commemoration of the 1972 Olympics massacre and no one from the Consulate staff was injured in Thursday’s incident.

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German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser described the exchange of fire as a serious incident adding that: “The protection of Israeli facilities has top priority.”

Head of Germany’s Central Council for Jews Josef Schuster said: “We don’t know all the background yet. What we do know leaves us in shock.”

Israeli President Isaac Herzog said he had spoken to his German counterpart about the incident in Munich. He said: “We expressed our shared condemnation and horror at the terror attack this morning.”

In October 2019, a gunman who had denounced Jews opened fire outside a German synagogue in the eastern city of Halle on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, killing two people.

It comes as politicians are debating how to prevent violent crime following a spate of attacks, most recently in the northwestern city of Solingen where three people were fatally stabbed by a Syrian asylum seeker at a festival.