German shooter’s plan to encourage copycats foiled as home-made guns jam repeatedly 

The terror attack by a far-Right gunman on a crowded synagogue in Germany might have been far more devastating if he hadn’t used a homemade gun built to British blueprints, it emerged on Thursday.

Video footage filmed with a headcam by Sebastian Balliert showed that the terror attack was a catalogue of mishaps and errors.

“Once a loser, always a loser,” Balliert says of himself at one point. At another he describes his attempt to get into the synagogue in Halle as a “hundred per cent fail”.

“At least I’ve proved homemade weapons are useless,” he says towards the end, after his gun jams repeatedly.

The video, originally live streamed on the gaming site Twitch, reportedly remained available om on Thursday and had attracted thousands of views despite attempts to take it down.

A manifesto in which Balliert announced his plan to attack synagogue on a German message board a week in advance also remained online.

The manifesto appears to indicate that Balliert built a home-made gun to plans put online by Philip Luty, a pro-gun activist from Yorkshire who died in 2011.

Halle map – zoom in

The documents suggest Baillert wanted to prove "the viability of improvised guns" and encourage copycats.

The gun, which failed repeatedly, was only one of the elements of his plan that went wrong. It is clear Balliert planned a massacre at the Halle synagogue, which was packed with 70 worshippers marking Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

But from the start, things started to go wrong for the would-be mass murderer. “I hope the door is open,” he says on the video footage, before arriving to find it locked.

He then attempts to blow it open using homemade explosives, but fails. The worshippers inside, alerted by the sound of the blast, barricaded themselves in to prevent him gaining entry.

Eventually Balliert gives up and returns to his car. A woman carrying a heavy backpack doesn’t notice his gun and expresses annoyance that the car is blocking the pavement. He guns her down in cold blood.

He then drives to a kebab shop where hs shoots dead a random customer. It appears his plan was to die in a shoot-out with police. As a police car approaches, he tells the camera: “Now I die”.

But even at that, Balliert failed.