A gunman opened fire near the Israeli consulate in Munich on Thursday and was killed by police, on the 52nd anniversary of the deadly terror attack there during the 1972 Olympics. No one else was hurt.
The consulate is located very close to the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, located on the site of the former Nazi party headquarters, leading some media to propose the museum as a potential target.
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 a.m.
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. Video showed the man with a rifle with a bayonet attached.
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; police deployed to the area in force after the shooting.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry confirmed the incident, and said that the consulate was closed at the time for the annual ceremony commemorating the 11 Israeli athletes killed by Palestinian terrorists during the 1972 Munich Olympics.
At those Games, eight members of the Black September terror group broke into the Israeli Olympic team’s residence, immediately killing one coach and one member of the weightlifting team, and taking nine more Israeli team members hostage. All were killed during a botched rescue operation, as was a West German police officer.
President Isaac Herzog spoke with his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier after the shooting, and thanked security forces for quickly neutralizing the gunman.
“On the day our brothers and sisters in Munich were set to stand in remembrance of our brave athletes murdered by terrorists 52 years ago, a hate-fuelled terrorist came and once again sought to murder innocent people,” Herzog said on X.
He also thanked the German security services “for their swift action,” writing, “Together we stand strong in the face of terror. Together we will overcome.”
Speaking at an unrelated news conference in Berlin, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said that “the protection of Jewish and Israeli facilities has the highest priority.”
The shooting came after police in the southwest German city of Heidelberg opened an investigation into an assault Monday by an unidentified man on an Israeli woman and her husband.
The attack was apparently motivated by the woman’s shirt, which bore a Star of David and the phrase “Bring Them Home Now,” referring to Israelis held hostage by the Hamas terror group.
According to police, the attacker first approached the woman and demanded she remove the shirt, and then attacked her as well as her husband when he tried to help. By the time police arrived at the scene, the assailant had fled.
The woman sustained minor injuries to her upper body, according to police.
Antisemitic incidents in Germany shot up following Hamas’s October 7 massacre in southern Israel, which started the ongoing war between Israel and the terror group. Attacks targeting Jews and Israelis have surged worldwide since the attack.