Hours after the attack in Munich, Germany, MSNBC's Brian Williams said it was a strange feeling to root for this attack to not be related to the Islamic State.
"And why does it feel so strange to kind of root for it not being ISIS?" he asked.
Williams then said that he was hoping this attack would break the cycle of IS attacks. This comes after the recent attacks in Istanbul, Turkey, and Nice, France in which multiple innocent people were tragically killed at soft target locations.
IS claimed responsibilities for these.
"To kind of– you know, to break the cycle even though every death is an absolute tragedy and this just means we have deranged people without the affiliation, you know?" Williams said.
Journalist Richard Engel had pointed out that there has been no proof that confirmed that this was IS.
"We don't know that this was ISIS and it's possible that it wasn't," he said. "The assumption, and it's a logical assumption based on all the attacks that we've seen recently, that it is ISIS, but there are certain things that are very unusual about this."
Engel cited that there was a small number of casualties, as well as the use of very small weapons and that these do not match typical IS-inspired strikes.
He added that with the small number of deaths, that this could be indicative of the attacker fleeing, which is also not common in ISI attacks.
"One, fairly small casualty numbers," he said. "Two, fairly small weapons. They didn't stick around and fight. Maybe that they only killed five, six, seven, eight people– I don't mean that each number doesn't count, but it's a relatively small number when we're talking about terrorism, it suggests that they ran away to either pick another target or save their own lives. That's generally not the ISIS M.O."