Salzburg public prosecutor’s office – no evidence of radicalization against later Munich shooters

According to the Salzburg public prosecutor’s office, despite investigations, there is no evidence of radicalization or Islamist propaganda against the Munich shooter. As the authority announced the day after the foiled attack on the Jewish Consulate General in Munich, the 18-year-old Austrian had not moved in Islamist circles in the past. The Austrian with Bosnian roots was shot dead by the police on Thursday.

According to the public prosecutor’s office, there was suspicion that the shooter killed on Thursday had threatened fellow students, allegedly causing bodily harm. Further suspicions were that he was interested in instructions on how to build bombs and may have been involved in a terrorist organization by depicting Islamist violence in an online game. These allegations relate to the period from 2021 to 2023.

Investigators therefore searched the youth’s home in the Salzburg region and confiscated the data storage device. However, no relevant material was found on his mobile phone, the justice authorities reported. They discovered three videos from a computer game on his PC that the then 14-year-old had recorded. They show scenes with Islamist content. Symbols of the Islamist group HTS were only visible on one of these videos, it was said.

No evidence was found that the videos had been distributed. Playing such a computer game and recreating Islamist scenes of violence did not constitute participation in a terrorist organization, it was said.

Investigations into the suspect’s environment also gave no indication that the accused moved in radical Islamic circles or lived a very religious life. According to the public prosecutor’s office, the young person lived “with relatively few social contacts”. No other objects or data relating to the Islamic State or bombs were found either. The investigation was therefore discontinued in April 2023.

Reports of contacts with Islamist militia

The news agency dpa had previously reported, citing security sources, that the youth had links to the Islamist group HTS. HTS stands for “Hayat Tahrir al-Sham,” a militant Islamist militia.

The Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Constitution writes that HTS emerged in 2017 from the merger of a former Al-Qaeda offshoot and several smaller militant Syrian groups. Unlike Al-Qaeda, which is planning further attacks in the West, HTS is concentrating on Syria and wants to overthrow the country’s ruler Bashar al-Assad.

The Bavarian police had no information about the shooter

The Bavarian police previously said they had no information about the dead shooter. A query of the databases on him was negative, said a spokesman for the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office (LKA). “We had no documents on him.”

In his home country of Austria, the police had imposed a weapons ban on the 18-year-olds following investigations into possible religious radicalization, which would have remained in force until at least the beginning of 2028, according to Salzburg police.

For further police investigations into the alleged attack, the State Criminal Police Office has set up a special commission called “Karolinenplatz”, named after the location of the incident. The authority will take over the investigation from the Munich criminal police during the course of the day, said an State Criminal Police Office spokesman. The lead agency is the Central Office for Combating Extremism and Terrorism at the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office.