After initial investigations into the Heidelberg amok case, the 18-year-old perpetrator Nico G. was mentally seriously ill.

This was announced by the public prosecutor's office in Heidelberg and the "Botany" investigation group of the Mannheim police on Wednesday.

The perpetrator was a member of the right-wing extremist party “Der III.

Gone”, but he had already left there when he was a minor.

An initial evaluation of hard drives and mobile phones has so far yielded no information about radicalization within one's own four walls or about the perpetrator's contacts in the right-wing extremist milieu.

Rudiger Soldt

Political correspondent in Baden-Württemberg.

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The biosciences student broke into a lecture hall at Heidelberg University on Monday afternoon with two weapons and 150 rounds of ammunition;

he had opened fire on the 26 students present there.

He fired multiple shots, killing a 23-year-old student with a headshot and injuring three other people.

They survived and are no longer receiving medical treatment in the university clinic.

In a messenger service he had written before the fact that he wanted to "punish people now".

For what is still unclear.

The initially expressed assumption that the perpetrator knew the killed fellow student has not been confirmed by the investigations so far.

After the attack in the lecture hall on the grounds of the botanical garden, he killed himself.  

The police have now also been able to determine how the perpetrator, who grew up in Berlin, got his hands on the guns without a gun license: He is said to have bought them in Austria. He bought the two weapons used in the crime in Heidelberg from an arms dealer. He acquired a third weapon, which he did not have with him at Neuenheimer Feld in Heidelberg, from a private individual. It is currently being examined whether the arms dealer in Austria has committed a criminal offense by selling the arms. Because of the different legal situation, however, this is difficult, said a police spokesman.

The public prosecutor's office also warned against the false news about alleged perpetrators and descriptions of the crime that was spreading on the Internet.

"Many of these messages are not only to be classified as rumours, but as false news deliberately launched to unsettle and complicate the investigation," said a spokesman for the public prosecutor's office.

Of course, such “fake news” is checked for its relevance under criminal law.