Flames raced down a steep hillside “like a freight train,” leaving smouldering remains of homes and forcing thousands to flee the wildfire churning through tinder-dry canyons in Southern California, authorities said on Sunday.The fire that has destroyed at least 18 homes in northern Los Angeles County gained ferocious new power two days after it broke out, sending so much smoke in the air that planes making drops on it had to be grounded for part of the afternoon.

“For this time of year, it’s the most extreme fire behaviour I’ve seen in my 32-year career,” County fire Chief Daryl Osby said.About 300 miles up the coast, crews were battling another fire spanning more than 17 square miles that destroyed six homes on Sunday and forced evacuations outside the scenic Big Sur region.The Southern California blaze has blackened more than 34 square miles of brush on ridgelines near the city of Santa Clarita, and authorities found a burned body in a car. No new measurements were available, but officials said the fire might now be double that size.

Planes were unable to make drops over the fire for a long stretch of the afternoon before resuming for a few hours before dusk. Helicopters released retardant around the perimeter of the fire all day and would continue into the night“The fire’s just doing what it wants right now,” U.S. Forest Service spokesman Nathan Judy said. “We have to stick back, let it do what it wants to and attack it where we can.”Juliet Kinikin said on Sunday, there was panic as the sky became dark with smoke and flames moved closer to her home a day earlier in the Sand Canyon area of Los Angeles County.

“And then we just focused on what really mattered in the house,” she told The Associated Press.Kinikin grabbed important documents and fled with her husband, two children, two dogs and three birds. They were back at home on Sunday, “breathing a big sigh of relief,” she said.Residents of thousands of homes were evacuated as shifting winds were pushing flames northeast through Angeles National Forest, authorities said.The fire has ripped through brush withered by days of 100-degree temperatures and years of drought.

“It started consuming houses that were non-defendable,” Los Angeles County Deputy Fire Chief John Tripp said, describing the flames as charging through terrain “like a freight train.”More than 1,600 firefighters were battling the flames that sent up a huge plume of smoke visible across the region.The fire destroyed film sets at Sable Ranch in Santa Clarita, which has Old West-style buildings used for movie locations. It also forced a non-profit sanctuary for rescued exotic creatures to evacuate 340 of its more than 400 animals, including Bengal tigers and a mountain lion.

North on the Central Coast, a blaze consuming brush in rugged mountains near Big Sur was threatening about 1,650 homes. It burned in inaccessible terrain 5 miles south of Garrapata State Park and forced the communities of Palo Colorado and Carmel Highlands to evacuate, California’s forestry department said.Brock Bradford lives in a historic house in Palo Colorado and could see the flames coming down the road as he evacuated.

“I hope I don’t have to rebuild my house,” he told the Monterey Herald. “I’m 66.”

The 18-year-old gunman who killed nine people in a shooting spree in Munich had been planning his crime for a year but chose his victims at random, officials said on Sunday.“He had been preparing [the shooting] for a year,” Bavarian police chief Robert Heimberger told a news conference.Chief prosecutor Thomas Steinkraus-Koch added that he did not specifically choose his victims.“It is not the case that he deliberately selected” the people who he shot, he said.

Obsessed with Breivik

In total, 58 shell casings have been recovered from the crime scene, fired by a Glock 9mm pistol that David Ali Sonboly illegally acquired via the Internet.A further 300 bullets were found in his rucksack.Sonboly was obsessed with Anders Behring Breivik, who massacred 77 people in Norway five years ago. But police also believe he was influenced by a previous shooting in Winnenden, south west Germany in 2009 when a 17-year-old shot 15 people in his former school before killing himself.

“Preliminary indications suggest that he was interested in that incident” and visited the site a year ago and took photos, said Mr. Heimberger.He subsequently planned his own crime, he added.Prosecutor Steinkraus-Koch said there was no indication that the shooting was politically-motivated or that he chose the victims because of their nationality.

The people who died had Hungarian, German-Turkish, Turkish, Kosovar or Greek nationality. Mr. Heimberger noted that the area where the shopping mall was situated and the McDonald’s outlet where Sonboly began his rampage were frequented by both foreigners and Germans with migrant backgrounds.The attacker set up a fake Facebook account in May, stealing the profile of a real user and sending out invitations to lure people to the fast-food restaurant.

Police corrected earlier reports that Sonboly had hacked into an existing account. But there was no evidence yet that any of the people who had interacted with Sonboly via the fake account had responded to the invitation in which he offered meals and drinks. None of the people who died appeared to have interacted with him.Sonboly appeared to have been the victim of bullying by fellow pupils back in 2012, filing a complaint against three of his tormentors.

But none of them were among the victims of the shooting.Police found medical documentation in his room that suggested he suffered from anxiety attacks and “social phobias”, particularly when it came to contact with others, prosecutor Mr. Steinkraus-Koch said. He was admitted to hospital for two months in 2015 to receive treatment for his psychological problems after which he continued treatment as an outpatient.