[Twosugars]

Two people died and two more were severely injured in the eastern German city of Halle on Wednesday after a gunman in a military-style outfit tried to force his way into a synagogue in an attempted mass shooting.

In a chilling echo of the Christchurch mosque shooting, the gunman recorded the attacks on a head-mounted camera and uploaded it online with an antisemitic and rightwing extremist rant. German media identified the killer as Stephan Balliet, a 27-year-old German citizen from the town of Eisleben in Saxony-Anhalt.

Authorities in the city in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, home to 230,000 people, said they were dealing with a “rampage situation” after several shots were fired in the Paulus quarter north of the city centre at about midday.

One woman was shot dead outside the synagogue near a Jewish cemetery and one man killed in a nearby kebab shop.

The German interior minister, Horst Seehofer, described it as an antisemitic attack.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-city-of-halle

The suspected gunman in the Yom Kippur synagogue attack in Halle, Germany, broadcast his rampage on the livestreaming platform Twitch, in the latest instance of rightwing extremists using mass shootings to create and promote real-time propaganda.

About 35 minutes of video was broadcast live on Twitch, an Amazon-owned platform that is primarily used by video game players, the company confirmed Wednesday. Twitch removed the video but copies had already been downloaded and shared elsewhere on the internet, highlighting the challenges faced by platforms attempting to stymy the dissemination of such material.

Having failed to enter the synagogue by shooting at the locks, the gunman shot dead two people nearby. Two others were injured. He was arrested after fleeing the scene.

The Halle attack is the second livestreamed rightwing extremist attack this year, following the March massacre of 51 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, which was broadcast on Facebook Live. The alleged gunman in the April synagogue shooting in Poway, California, shared a Facebook Live link in a manifesto posted on the extremist message board 8chan prior to his attack, suggesting that he planned to livestream the shooting that left one dead and two injured.

“Livestreaming enables extremists to amplify their actions, but even more so, bringing their supporters and others that they want to inspire on the journey with them,” said Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “It is an interactive radicalization tool that also helps spread content that may inspire the next attacker after them.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...e-livestreamed

The deadly attack carried out by a masked gunman in eastern Germany would have ended with many more victims if his homemade firearms had not malfunctioned, footage broadcast on a livestreaming platform suggests.

The gunman, who tried to force his way into a synagogue in the town of Halle on Wednesday before killing two people, broadcast his rampage on the Twitch platform.

The footage shows the suspect becoming increasingly frustrated as his homemade weapons repeatedly malfunction. In at least three instances the video shows the suspect pointing a gun directly at a victim only for the weapon to jam.

Calling himself a “loser”, at one point he says: “I have certainly managed to prove how absurd improvised weapons are.”

Germany’s chief federal prosecutor Peter Frank said on Thursday that the suspect wanted to carry out a “massacre” and had about four kilograms of explosives in his car.

A mission statement that the suspect uploaded to Kohlchan – the German message board equivalent of 4chan – where it was later found by researchers at the International Centre for the Study of Extremism at King’s College, London, appears to confirm the use of homemade firearms built according to plans released by a British pro-gun activist from West Yorkshire.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ly-video-shows