A car ramming incident left two people dead and multiple others injured in the city of Mannheim, Germany on Monday, reports say.
A suspect rammed a car into a crowd of people in Mannheim, Germany on Monday, killing two people and injuring multiple others, reports say.
Police said the suspect is in custody, but would not immediately characterize the incident as an attack. The driver is a 40-year-old German from the nearby state of Rhineland-Palatinate, Thomas Strobl, the state interior minister of Baden-Württemberg, where Mannheim is based, told German news agency dpa.
“We mourn with the relatives of the victims of a senseless act of violence and fear for those injured. We cannot accept this,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wrote on X.
Local media reported that a car drove at a high rate of speed into the crowd in Mannheim’s Paradeplatz square, according to Reuters. Locals were urged to avoid the downtown area in Mannheim due to police activity.
SUSPECT IN MUNICH CAR ATTACK HAD ‘ISLAMIST MOTIVATION,’ PROSECUTOR SAYS
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser canceled her participation in the carnival street parade in Cologne due to the events in Mannheim.
“The focus is now on saving lives, treating the injured and the initial investigations by the authorities in Mannheim,” an interior ministry spokesperson told the dpa news agency.
Mannheim University Hospital said they were treating three people from the crash, two adults and a child, dpa reported.
The incident happened weeks after a car ramming attack in Munich left a 2-year-old girl and her mother dead.
GERMANY’S NEW CONSERVATIVE LEADER LOOKS TO ‘ACHIEVE INDEPENDENCE’ FROM US
That attack happened a day before Vice President JD Vance and others gathered in Munich for the Munich Security Conference.
German prosecutors later said the suspect in the Munich incident, a 24-year-old Afghan, appeared to have been motivated by Islamic extremism.
Last year, six people also were killed and more than 200 injured when a car slammed into a Christmas market in eastern Germany city of Magdeburg.
The suspect, who was arrested, was a 50-year-old doctor originally from Saudi Arabia who had expressed anti-Muslim views and support for the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative For Germany party, the AP reported.
Fox News’ Thomas Ferraro and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
