German police kill gunman near Israeli Consulate in Munich 52 years after Munich Olympics attack
Munich — Police in Munich exchanged fire with a man in an area near a museum on the city’s Nazi-era history and the Israeli Consulate Thursday, leaving the suspect, identified as an 18-year-old Austrian national, fatally wounded.
According to police spokesperson Andreas Franken, officers noticed 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 was fatally wounded, but there was no indication that anyone else was hurt, Franken said.
The man, who was carrying an old make of firearm with a repeating mechanism, died at the scene. Bavaria’s top security official, state Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, said the suspect had opened fire at police and they returned fire.
Peter Kneffel/picture alliance/Getty
Thursday marked 52 years since the attack by Palestinian militants on the Israeli delegation at the 1972 Munich Olympics, which ended with the death of 11 Israeli team members, a West German police officer and five of the assailants. Bavarian state premier Markus Soeder said there was “a terrible suspicion” that case was linked to the date marking that attack on Israeli athletes in 1972.
grappled with a rise in antisemitism for several years. A gunman who had railed against Jews opened fire outside a synagogue in the German city of Halle on Yom Kippur, Judaism’s holiest day, in 2022, killing two people.
Suspected antisemitic terror plot foiled in Europe, alleged Hamas members arrested
02:42
As CBS News correspondent Chris Livesay reported in July, nearly 40% of the antisemitic incidents reported worldwide during 2023 were in Europe, and there was a spike after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas sparked the ongoing war with Israel in Gaza. In Germany, reports of antisemitic incidents nearly doubled last year, while in the U.K., they more than doubled and in France, they nearly quadrupled.
Livesay reported that the sharp rise in such incidents in Europe was driving some Jews to abandon their lives on the continent and move to Israel, despite that country being engaged in an active war.
Source: cbsnews.com