Munich- On Thursday, police in Munich fired at a man near an exhibit about the city’s past during the Nazi era and the Israeli Consulate. The suspect was hurt.
Police spokesman Andreas Franken said that around 9 a.m., cops saw a person with a “long gun” in the Karolinenplatz area, which is close to downtown Munich. After a few shots were fired, the suspect was badly hurt, but Franken said there were no signs that anyone else was hurt.
On Thursday, it was 52 years since Palestinian militants attacked the Israeli group at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Eleven Israeli team members, a West German police officer, and five of the attackers were killed. It wasn’t clear if the event on Thursday had anything to do with the attack 52 years ago.
Police said there was no proof that any other suspects were involved with the crime. They made themselves more visible in the city, which is Germany’s third-largest, but they said they had no information about events or suspects in any other places.
There were five police officers at the scene of the killing, but more police were sent to the area afterward. Franken told them he didn’t know anything else about the subject or his gun.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry said that the consulate in Munich was closed during the shooting because of a remembrance event for the 1993 Olympics attack. No one from the consulate was hurt. The close museum also said that none of its workers were hurt.
At a press conference in Berlin that had nothing to do with the shooting, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser called it “a serious incident” but didn’t want to guess what had happened. “The protection of Jewish and Israeli facilities has the highest priority,” she said again.
Antisemitism has been on the rise in Germany and other Western European countries for a number of years.