On the evening of Friday, July 22, 2016, David Sonboly killed nine people in Munich within a few minutes and injured several more, some of them seriously. Several of the dead were minors. He was 18, born and raised in the city, and he died by suicide that same evening, so no court ever heard the case. The deaths were attributed to him by the Munich I public prosecutor's office and the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office, the Landeskriminalamt or LKA, whose investigators spent close to a year reconstructing his life. Their first conclusion, in 2017, was that he had acted alone and that personal revenge for years of bullying lay at the center of the act. That conclusion did not hold. After expert reports commissioned by the city of Munich, further checks of his online life and a long political argument in the Bavarian parliament, the LKA classified the killings in October 2019 as politically motivated violent crime of the right, finding that he had chosen his victims partly because of their ethnicity or origin.
He was born in Munich on April 20, 1998, and was given the first name Ali. He held both German and Iranian citizenship. When he came of age he changed his first name to David; the Bavarian Interior Ministry later recorded that he had rejected the name Ali as inferior. German police and prosecutors, following German privacy practice, referred to him in public as David S.
His difficulties began early. Throughout his childhood he was examined and treated, sometimes as an outpatient and sometimes in a clinic, and some of that treatment involved medication. Over the years, police later established, child and adolescent psychiatrists diagnosed early childhood autism at a high level of functioning, post-traumatic stress disorder, moderate to severe depression, computer addiction and social phobia. The ministry's report singled out the autism as the condition that marked his personality most lastingly, above all in a severe lack of empathy and an inability to behave according to social conventions. In 2015 he spent about two months as an inpatient in psychiatric care, treated among other things for a fear of contact with other people, and then continued as an outpatient, and he was still seeing a doctor in the month before the killings. The treatment, the ministry concluded, had not resolved his problems. He had no criminal record.
He attended schools in Munich from 2004 to 2015, changing middle schools three times. His school records described him as a motivated pupil who did his work with a sense of duty and interest, and in 2015 he passed the examination for the intermediate school certificate. His application to a technical upper secondary school was turned down.
From the fifth through the eighth grade, a group of four to six classmates bullied him. The bullying grew more intense year by year and by the seventh and eighth grades took place every day. He was insulted, his clothes were taken and soaked during sports lessons, he was forced under threats to do other pupils' chores and homework, and he was pushed, tripped and hit. He stopped leaving the classroom during breaks and took different buses after school to avoid the boys who tormented him. In 2012 he filed a complaint against three classmates. None of the people who bullied him was among the dead, and investigators found that none of those killed was known to him.
The ministry's report described a young man with practically no friends who was largely isolated in everyday life. The few friendships he had fell away one by one, he had no romantic relationships so far as investigators could establish, and he withdrew more and more from his own family. He retreated into the world of his computer. Online combat games became his great passion; investigators calculated that he had spent 4,348 hours on a single team game. That pattern of play was one of the reasons he was in psychological and psychiatric treatment.
In chats with other players his hatred fastened above all on young people of Turkish descent, the group he blamed for the bullying. He was linked to at least 15 accounts on one online gaming platform, where his accounts were members of groups whose names were hostile to refugees and to Turkey, and where he used player names that invoked German pride and a far-right party. Investigators did not find posts of his own on the platform that expressed far-right views, though in online forums he described himself as an Aryan.
He took a close interest in the perpetrators of earlier rampages in Germany and the United States and in the Norwegian far-right attacker Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people on July 22, 2011. He researched Breivik's killings online. Twice, on June 2, 2015, and March 11, 2016, he traveled to the memorial for the 2009 school killings in Winnenden, in Baden-Württemberg, and photographed it. Among his books investigators found a youth novel about a young neo-Nazi and a German edition of an academic study of why students kill, with several pages marked in yellow.
On July 24, 2015, he wrote a two-page text that investigators came to call his manifesto. In it he wrote with open hatred about former classmates and about foreign residents of one Munich district, in dehumanizing terms. The ministry described the style as confused and the content as full of hatred. Investigators concluded that he had prepared the killings over about a year, and the date he chose, July 22, 2016, was the fifth anniversary of Breivik's killings.
Early that evening, near the Olympia shopping center in the Munich district of Moosach, he killed nine people within a few minutes and injured several more. Most of the dead were young. He died by suicide that evening in Munich.
For several hours the city did not know whether one attacker or several were at large. Police at first believed that as many as three people might be involved. By early Saturday police said that they believed he had been the only perpetrator.
The LKA led the police inquiry under the direction of the Munich I public prosecutor's office, through a special commission named after the shopping center, the Soko OEZ. Neither the prosecutors nor the LKA considered handing the case to the Federal Criminal Police Office. On Sunday, July 24, 2016, investigators set out their first findings. He had planned the act for about a year, they said, and they found no sign of links to the Islamic State group and, at that stage, no sign of a political motive. They had found the two-page text in his locked room and were still working through what they described as many more terabytes of data. As early as August 1, 2016, the Soko asked the American company that ran his gaming platform for account data and chat records; the company replied that chat logs were deleted within two weeks.
In the months that followed, the investigation established much of his biography as it was later set out: the diagnoses, the bullying, the isolation, the hours of play, the fascination with rampage killers. Investigators found no evidence that anyone else had known of his plans or incited him, and none that he had belonged to any network. When a member of the Bavarian parliament asked in early 2017 whether he had deliberately targeted people of foreign origin, the Interior Ministry replied on March 1, 2017, that the inquiry into his motives was not finished and that the questions could not yet be answered; the state's domestic intelligence service, it added, had no findings on the ideological currents the question raised.
On Friday, March 17, 2017, the prosecutors and the LKA presented their final report. It ran to more than 170 pages and rested on more than 1,000 video files and more than 2,000 interviews and witness statements. He had planned and carried out the killings alone, it found; no accomplice existed, and nothing showed that the doctors, teachers or anyone else around him could have seen the act coming. Because he was dead, the report added, his motives could never be fully confirmed. The Munich I prosecutor's office then closed the proceedings with a closing order dated May 4, 2017. That first final assessment by the prosecutors and the LKA found that he had acted alone and treated the act chiefly as one of revenge driven by the bullying, a rampage rather than a political attack, and it excluded a political background. Revenge for the bullying, mental illness, a lack of social contacts and excessive play of combat video games were all named as factors in his motives. In the authorities' telling it was a classic, unpolitical rampage, and his far-right ideas were treated as a by-product of the inquiry rather than a cause. Investigators also recorded even then that he had built up a racist world of ideas.
The finding that the act was not political was disputed. The city of Munich commissioned three researchers to examine the case, and their reports were presented at an expert hearing on October 6, 2017. Two of the three concluded that the act should be classed as right-wing terrorism. One report, dated October 2, 2017, described bullying and the wish for revenge as contributing causes of his racist prejudice and argued that the selection of victims from immigrant families made the killings a racist hate crime. A second found serious grounds for treating the act as a rampage driven by personal revenge, but said it also contained elements that pointed to a political motivation as well, and it criticized the authorities for separating rampage and political attack too strictly and for settling on a single main motive. A third described the case as lone-wolf terrorism.
The LKA, for its part, commissioned a criminologist at the University of Giessen who had studied rampage killings for years. Her report reached the LKA on February 21, 2018, was presented to an invited audience on April 9, 2018, was sent to the Bavarian parliament on July 17, 2018, and was published on the Bavarian police website on July 27, 2018. It described him as a typical young rampage killer with marked psychopathology who rejected young migrants of a particular ethnic background in fantasies of hatred, rage, killing and revenge, and it placed its main emphasis on his mental illness. In 2018 the Federal Office of Justice, for its own purposes, treated the act as extremist.
The Bavarian parliament passed resolutions on December 12, 2017, and July 10, 2018, asking the state government to report on his motives and on how it assessed the killings. Further questions followed in 2018 after press reports about his contacts on the gaming platform. The prosecutors and the LKA opened new checks of their own motion in April 2018. Those checks found no exchange of plans between him and anyone else, no criminal involvement of any third party, and no direct influence, incitement or radicalization by others.
On October 24, 2019, the Bavarian Interior Ministry, in agreement with the Ministry of Justice, sent the parliament its report on the motives and background of the killings. It concluded that the motive that set off the act could not be settled beyond doubt, since he could never be questioned and had left no document or statement that could be read clearly. What the evidence did show, the ministry wrote, was a bundle of causes: the bullying and the wish for revenge it produced, his mental illness, a racism he had developed out of personal experience, his fascination with rampage killings and his excessive play of combat games, each feeding the others until they culminated in the act. The racist outlook, it said, was not especially in the foreground, but it must not be neglected.
The ministry then turned to the question of classification. It found indications that he had committed the act partly out of political motivation in the sense used by police statistics, and that he had chosen his victims partly because of their ethnicity or origin. It pointed to the hatred of foreign residents of a Munich district in his 2015 text, to the dehumanizing terms he used. It treated the killing of nine people as evidence of a particular readiness for violence. And it listed signs of a right-wing orientation: admiration for Hitler, drawings of swastikas, hostile and contemptuous language about foreigners, his membership of the platform groups, and his interest in Breivik. The coincidence of the killings with the fifth anniversary of Breivik's attacks, the ministry wrote, did not appear to be accidental. Witnesses had described him as proud both of his Persian roots and of his German citizenship, and he believed that the origin of the Aryans lay in Persia.
After weighing all of this, the authorities classified the act as "Politisch Motivierte Gewaltkriminalität -rechts-", politically motivated violent crime of the right, and recorded it as such in the police reporting service for politically motivated crime. The LKA announced the decision on October 25, 2019, and the shift had drawn on the expert reports, on research by journalists and on the work of the city of Munich's office for democracy. In its words, after three years of investigation it appeared justified to speak of a political motivation, and his radical right-wing and racist views should not be ignored.
Because he died on the day of the killings, there was never an indictment, a trial or a verdict. The Munich I prosecutor's office brought the proceedings to a close with its own closing order, dated May 4, 2017, and every later finding about his motives came from investigators, the state ministries and the reports they commissioned rather than from a court. The classification of 2019 was not a judgment either. It was an entry under the nationwide police definition system for politically motivated crime, known by its German initials as PMK, which governs how offenses are counted in police statistics. Under that system an offense is assigned to politically motivated crime when the circumstances of the act or the attitude of the offender give indications that it was directed against a person because of nationality, ethnic origin or outward appearance, and the act is causally linked to that. The motive need not be established with certainty, and it need not be the only reason for the act. That standard is what allowed the authorities to keep their finding of a bundle of motives, with revenge at its core, and still place the case in the category of right-wing political violence. The LKA's expert had been asked to apply both versions of the definition system, the one in force until December 31, 2016, and the one that took effect on January 1, 2017.
The central dispute was never about who caused the nine deaths, which investigators attributed to him alone from the first days, but about why. The first final assessment in 2017 excluded a political background; the 2019 classification placed the case among politically motivated violent crimes of the right. Even after 2019 the authorities did not describe the act as terrorism, while two of the three researchers commissioned by the city did. The criminologist engaged by the LKA saw it as a rampage rooted mainly in mental illness. Whether he intended from the outset to die that day could not be answered with the necessary certainty. Investigators at first said he appeared to have chosen his victims at random; by 2019 the ministry found that he had chosen them partly because of their ethnicity or origin.
April 20, 1998: Born in Munich and named Ali; he held German and Iranian citizenship.
2004 to 2015: Attends schools in Munich; bullied by a group of classmates from the fifth through the eighth grade.
2012: Files a complaint against three classmates.
2015: Spends about two months in inpatient psychiatric care, then continues as an outpatient; passes the intermediate school certificate examination.
June 2, 2015: First visit to the memorial for the 2009 Winnenden school killings.
July 24, 2015: Writes the two-page text later called his manifesto.
March 11, 2016: Second visit to the Winnenden memorial.
2016: On coming of age, changes his first name from Ali to David.
July 22, 2016: Kills nine people in Munich and injures several more; dies by suicide in Munich the same evening.
July 24, 2016: Investigators say he planned the act for about a year.
August 1, 2016: The Soko OEZ asks the operator of his gaming platform for account data.
March 1, 2017: The Interior Ministry tells the Bavarian parliament the inquiry into his motives is not finished.
March 17, 2017: The prosecutors and the LKA present their final report; it finds he acted alone.
May 4, 2017: The Munich I public prosecutor's office closes the proceedings.
October 6, 2017: Expert reports commissioned by the city of Munich are presented; two of three call the act right-wing terrorism.
December 12, 2017: The Bavarian parliament asks the state government to report on his motives.
February 21, 2018: The criminologist's report commissioned by the LKA is delivered; it is published on July 27, 2018.
April 2018: Prosecutors and the LKA open further checks of his online contacts.
July 10, 2018: A second parliamentary resolution asks for a report.
October 24, 2019: The Interior Ministry sends its report on his motives to the Bavarian parliament.
October 25, 2019: The LKA announces the classification of the killings as politically motivated violent crime of the right.