At least nine people were killed and at least 16 were injured Friday in a shooting rampage at a busy shopping district in Munich, Germany, police said.
Police searched for attackers, thinking there might be three, and found a man who had killed himself on a side street near Olympia shopping mall, police Chief Hubertus Andrae said.
Based on surveillance video and witness statements, police concluded he was the sole gunman, Andrae said.
The unidentified attacker was an 18-year-old German-Iranian who had lived in Munich for at least two years.
The man was not known to police and his motives are unclear, authorities said. No group has claimed responsibility.
Many children were among the casualties.
The shooting comes as recent terrorist attacks have put Europe on high alert.
This week, a teenager who said he was inspired by ISIS stabbed passengers on a German train before police shot him dead. Eight days earlier, 84 people were killed when a man drove a large truck through a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France.
Children unable to run away
The gunman in Munich started shooting at a McDonald’s across from the Olympia mall around 5:50 p.m. (11:50 a.m. ET), Andrae said.
A witness who wanted to be identified only by her first name, Lauretta, told CNN her son was in the bathroom with a shooter at the restaurant.
“That’s where he loaded his weapon,” she said. “I hear like an alarm and boom, boom, boom … and he’s still killing the children. The children were sitting to eat. They can’t run.”
Lauretta said she heard the gunman say, “Allahu Akbar,” or “God is great” in Arabic. “I know this because I’m Muslim. I hear this and I only cry.”
Huseyin Bayri, a witness of the shooting, said he heard the attacker screaming out that he will kill “foreigners.”
“I heard a scream at first: ‘You shitty [bleep] foreigners. I am German. You will get it.'”
The gunman moved across the street to the mall, which is adjacent to the site of the 1972 Olympics. Located in a middle-class neighborhood in northern Munich, the shopping mall is the city’s biggest and a popular destination for shoppers on Friday nights, German lawmaker Charles Huber told CNN.