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. The suspect was 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 seriously wounded, but there no was no indication that anyone else was hurt, Franken said.
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. It was unclear whether the incident on Thursday was in any way related to the attack 52 years earlier.
Peter Kneffel/picture alliance/Getty
Police said there was no evidence of any other suspects being 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 of the shooting, but police deployed to the area in force after the incident. Franken said he had no further details on the suspect or on his firearm.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry said the consulate in Munich was closed when the shooting occurred for a memorial event to mark the Olympics attack and that no consulate staff were hurt. The nearby museum also said all its employees were unharmed.
Speaking at an unrelated news conference in Berlin, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser described Thursday’s shooting as “a serious incident” but said she didn’t want to speculate on what had happened. She reiterated that “the protection of Jewish and Israeli facilities has the highest priority.”
Germany, along with other Western European nations, have grappled with a rise in antisemitism for several years.
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.
