A suspected gunman has been shot dead by German police near the Israeli consulate and a Nazi history museum in Munich, according to Bavaria state’s Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann.
The deadly incident took place in the Karolinenplatz area of Germany’s third-biggest city and the capital of Bavaria at about 9am (07:00 GMT) on Thursday and involved an 18-year-old Austrian national who acted “with a long-barrelled gun”, a Munich police spokesperson said.
Reporting from Berlin, Al Jazeera’s Dominic Kane said police were trying to establish the motive and where the weapon came from.
“From their perspective, this incident is over. They are now trying to piece together what happened and what made this individual do what he did and how he got the weapon what he appears to have used in this incident,” he said.
The incident took place on the anniversary of the 1972 attack at the Olympic Games in Munich, in which members of the Palestinian Black September Organisation murdered 11 Israeli athletes.
Herrmann said the man “shot at the police officers” and died after they “returned fire”.
The minister later said he could not rule out the possibility that the suspect was targeting the Israeli consulate.
Police said none of the five officers involved in the shooting suffered injuries, and there were no indications of further suspects.
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the consulate was closed on Thursday for a commemoration of the Munich Olympics massacre and no one from the consulate staff was injured in the incident.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog said he spoke with his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier. He wrote on the social media platform X that “together we expressed our shared condemnation and horror” at the shooting.
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser described it as a serious incident but declined to speculate on the circumstances and background.
She said “the protection of Jewish and Israeli facilities” was the “highest priority”.
The Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, which focuses on the history of Germany’s 1933-45 Nazi regime, is located near the Israeli consulate in Munich’s Maxvorstadt neighbourhood.
Police had said earlier in a post on X a large operation was under way in response to an incident and asked the public to avoid the area.
A helicopter had been deployed to provide a better overview of the situation.