Two dead and 11 injured after car drives into crowd in German city of Mannheim

LAST UPDATE | 5 hrs ago

TWO PEOPLE HAVE died and 11 others have been injured after a car drove into a crowd of people in the southwestern German city of Mannheim.

Politicians and police treated the noon-time vehicle rampage on a pedestrianised street in city of Mannheim as a deliberate act.

Germany has been shocked by two other deadly car-ramming attacks since December.

“Once again we mourn with the relatives of the victims of a senseless act of violence and fear for the injured,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on X, adding: “We cannot accept this.”

“This act is one of several crimes in the recent past in which a car was misused as a weapon,” said the Baden-Wuerttemberg state interior minister Thomas Strobl.

A 40-year-old German suspect was arrested at the scene.

Strobl said the sole suspect in the case lived in the city of Ludwigshafen, which lies directly across the river Rhine from Mannheim but is in the neighbouring state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

Strobl added that investigators saw “no indication of an extremist or religious background”, while prosecutors said investigators had “concrete indications that the perpetrator had a mental illness”.

Previous conviction

The suspect had several previous convictions, including being fined in 2018 for “hate speech” after he posted a comment on Facebook next to a far-right image, prosecutor Romeo Schuessler said.

Officials confirmed reports the suspect shot himself in the mouth with a blank-firing pistol as he was being arrested, and needed medical treatment. His condition was described as stable but police had not yet been able to question him.

His condition was described as stable but police had not yet been able to question him.

The driver ploughed a small black Ford passenger vehicle through a downtown pedestrian shopping area at around 12:15 local time where a carnival market was located with dozens of food stalls, rides and games.

Mannheim University Hospital said it has prepared for a possible mass casualty incident, German news agency dpa reported.

A total of eight trauma teams have been made available, both for adults and children.

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It is believed that at least one child was injured by the vehicle.

Local news outlet Mannheimer Morgen quoted a witness as saying a car “raced” through a pedestrianised part of the city and hit a crowd at a market. German news outlet Bild says the car was a black SUV.

The incident occurred as crowds gathered in cities across regions including Germany’s Rhineland for parades to mark the carnival season.

A local carnival market in Mannheim opened last Thursday, and a parade took place yesterday. A further traditional street carnival event was planned for tomorrow, according to local reports.

Enes Yildiz, 24, who works in tax consulting at a nearby office, said: “I just heard a very, very loud noise. It was rather extraordinary, not a noise that you hear every day.”

He went down to the street and saw a dead body lying on the ground and pools of blood, he said. The motionless victim appeared to have been thrown through the air by the impact.

“There were a lot of people crying, people shouting for help, people calling the police.”

He walked further down the street to witness the carnage at the city’s central Paradeplatz: “It was a mess, as if it had been hit by a bomb. The whole place was in disarray.”

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said before the incident in Mannheim that festivities were taking place “with high security precautions”.

Faeser cancelled her visit to the Rose Monday parade in Cologne to travel to Mannheim.

The incident is the latest in a series of vehicle rammings across Germany in recent months.

In February, a two-year-old girl and her mother were killed after a man drove a car into a group of trade union demonstrators in Munich.

Six people were killed and hundreds were wounded in Magdeburg in December after a car-ramming attack at a Christmas market.

Additional reporting from AFP.

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