The Munich shooting

An 18-year-old man has shot and killed nine people and wounded at least 15, some of them possibly mortally, at a shopping centre in Munich, Germany. It is the third attack on civilians in Europe in eight days. The story emerged in dribs and drabs, confused by misinformation on all fronts and still far from clear. What little is known is that the man was of German-Iranian origin, he was acting alone and did not have a long gun but a pistol, that he shouted to bystanders from a rooftop “I am German” and that at the end he probably shot himself dead, though he may have been wounded as well by a plain-clothes police officer who engaged with him at the site of the original shooting.

When is a terrorist not a terrorist? There was caution exercised from the outset by the German authorities as to the precise nature of the incident. There were no claims of ownership by any group. There was media speculation that the attack was linked to the German far right — it was the fourth anniversary of the Uttoya attacks by Anders Brevik — but in the end nobody knew anything for sure. There have been reports that the shooter was ‘in therapy’ and that ‘he had been bullied’ but no reports of any affiliation to any known terrorist group.

Not all mass killings are acts of terrorism in that they have a political underpinning. Terror was certainly the product of the shooters’ actions in Munich but his true intent is unknown. It is all too easy in these hot-house days to jump to judgments that are ill-informed and feed the actual and latent tensions within societies around the world, not only in Europe. There have been past incidents of mass-shooting in Germany that were not linked to terrorism, and it is entirely possible that this latest tragedy is the product of a disturbed young man with a gun who opened fire at the behest of whatever was going on inside his head at the time. Munich experienced terror, but whether it was at the hands of a terrorist remains an open question.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 24^th, 2016.

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