The man killed in a shootout with police in Munich Thursday was an 18-year-old citizen of neighboring Austria, police said. Authorities believed he may have planned an attack on the Israeli Consulate in the city. The suspect was fatally wounded in an area near the consulate and a museum on the city’s Nazi-era history after officers were alerted to man carrying a “long gun.” There was no indication that anyone else was hurt. According to a police spokesperson, officers were alerted to a person carrying a “long gun” in the Karolinenplatz area, near downtown Munich, at around 9 am. There was then an exchange of shots in which the suspect sustained fatal injuries, but there no was no indication that anyone else was hurt, spokesperson Andreas Franken told reporters. There was no immediate information on the suspect’s identity or on any motive, Franken said.
The man, who was carrying an old make of firearm with a repeating mechanism, died at the scene. Bavaria’s top security official, state Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, said the suspect had opened fire at police and they returned fire. It was unclear whether the incident was in any way related to the 52nd anniversary Thursday of the attack by Palestinian militants on the Israeli delegation at the 1972 Munich Olympics, which ended with the death of 11 Israeli team members, a West German police officer and five of the assailants.
Police said there was no evidence of any more suspects connected to the incident. They increased their presence in the city, Germany’s third-biggest, but said they had no indication of incidents at any other locations or of any other suspects. Five officers were at the scene at the time the gunfire erupted. Police later deployed to the area in force.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry said the consulate in Munich was closed when the shooting occurred and that none of its staff had been hurt.
The nearby Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, which opened in 2015 and explores the city’s past as the birthplace of the Nazi movement, also said all of its employees were unharmed. Israeli President Isaac Herzog said he spoke with German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
He wrote on the social media platform X that “together we expressed our shared condemnation and horror” at the shooting.
Speaking at an unrelated news conference in Berlin, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser described Thursday’s shooting as “a serious incident” but said she didn’t want to speculate on what had happened. She reiterated that “the protection of Jewish and Israeli facilities has the highest priority.”
