A man rammed a German school group into a car in a popular Berlin shopping district on Wednesday, killing a teacher and seriously injuring nine. He was quickly arrested.
Police said the man clashed with people on the side of the road at around 10:30 a.m., drove the car back onto the road and then rammed into the window of a shop about a block away. The driver was apparently detained by passersby and then immediately arrested by a police officer near the scene.
Berlin’s top security official, Iris Spanger, said the woman killed was a teacher on a trip to the German capital with students from a secondary school in the central German state of Hesse.
Officers worked for hours to determine whether it was a deliberate attack or an accident. On Wednesday evening, Ms Spanger made it clear on Twitter that officials now believe it was the former, calling it “an amok act by a psychologically challenged person”.
Fire service spokesman Adrian Wentzel, six people received life-threatening injuries and three others were seriously injured. Police said 14 students from Hesse were involved in injuries of varying severity, but did not give a total number.
American-British actor John Barrowman, who was in a nearby store at the time, described the scene as a “genocide”.
Police said the driver was a 29-year-old German-Armenian who lived in Berlin. Ms Spanger said posters were found in the man’s car “in which he expressed views about Turkey.” She added that “there was no claim of responsibility.”
Ms Spanger told regional public broadcaster RBB that Germany’s domestic intelligence agency had no immediate information about the man and that officials were still investigating whether he had known police before. He was taken to a hospital.
Berlin Mayor Franziska Giffy said she was “deeply shocked” by the incident, which she said brought back “horrible memories” of a truck attack on nearby Brettscheidplatz square more than five years ago. An Islamic extremist walks into a Christmas market in 2016. Due to which 13 people died.
In a 2019 incident in central Berlin, an SUV hit a group of pedestrians, killing four people. The driver had an epileptic seizure and overturned on the sidewalk.
A memorial service for those killed or injured in Wednesday’s crash was held in the evening at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Breitscheidplatz, next to the crash site.