German police kill suspect in firefight near Israeli consulate in Munich
PHOTO CAPTION: Police secure the area after German police opened fire on a suspect after seeing someone who appeared to be carrying a gun near the Israeli consulate and a Nazi history museum in central Munich, Germany, September 5, 2024. REUTERS/Anja Guder
By Anja Guder
MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) -German police shot dead a man in an exchange of fire near the Israeli consulate and a Nazi history museum in Munich on Thursday, state Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said.
"Due to the intervention of the police, the perpetrator was stopped," Herrmann told reporters. A police spokesperson in the Bavarian state capital said the man had a "long-barrelled gun" that proved to be an old rifle.
The incident occurred on the anniversary of the 1972 attack at the Munich Olympics in which Palestinian militants murdered 11 Israeli athletes. The motive of the gunman in Thursday's incident was not immediately known, but Herrmann said police would try to clarify whether it had any link to the anniversary.
The suspect was a teenage Austrian national who had recently travelled to Germany and lived in Austria's Salzburg area near the border with Bavaria, the Standard newspaper and Spiegel news outlet reported.
He is said to have been known to security authorities as an Islamist, they added.
Police in Munich declined to comment on the report and said they were not currently sharing information about the suspect.
The Israeli foreign ministry said the consulate was closed on Thursday for a commemoration of that massacre and no one from the consulate staff was injured in the incident.
The museum and research institute, which focuses on the history of Germany's 1933-45 Nazi regime, is located near the Israeli consulate in Munich's Maxvorstadt neighbourhood.
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser described the exchange of fire as a serious incident. "The protection of Israeli facilities has top priority," she said.
The shooting comes at a time of heightened polarisation in Germany's political climate. On Sunday, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) became the first far-right party to win a regional election since World War Two.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog said he had spoken to his German counterpart.
"We expressed our shared condemnation and horror at the terror attack this morning," Herzog posted on X, adding that on the day of remembrance for the Olympics massacre, "a hate-fueled terrorist came and once again sought to murder innocent people".
(Reporting by Rachel More, Miranda Murray, Klaus Lauer, Thomas Seythal in Berlin, Louis van Boxel-Woolf in Gdansk, James Mackenzie in Jerusalem; writing by Madeline Chambers; editing by Matthias Williams and Mark Heinrich)
