A driver rammed a car into a crowd Monday in the southwestern German city of Mannheim, and authorities said two people were killed and several others injured.
A 40-year-old German from the nearby state of Rhineland-Palatinate was detained and in a hospital after being injured, State Interior Minister Thomas Strobl of Baden-Württemberg, where Mannheim is based, told German news agency dpa.
Local police have said they believed the suspect acted alone, and they would not immediately characterize the incident as an attack. Cars have been used as deadly weapons in several acts of violence in recent months in Germany.
Bild newspaper reported that in addition to the deceased, 25 people were injured, 15 of them seriously. The paper cited security sources.
Images from the scene showed parts of the downtown area were cordoned off, with a heavy police presence and helicopters hovering above. Police gathered round a badly damaged black car as ambulances lined up outside the cordon.
Mannheim University Hospital said they were treating three people from the crash, two adults and a child, German news agency DPA reported. It was not immediately clear whether other hospitals received patients.
The country’s regional interior minister said there are no indications the driver had “an extremist or religious background” that motivated the attack.
“The motivation may rather be rooted in the perpetrator’s own personal circumstances,” Thomas Strobl, interior minister of the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, told reporters. “However, this is the subject of ongoing investigations.”
Paradeplatz, a major square in the downtown area, lies at the end of a pedestrianized street in Mannheim, which has a population of 326,000 and lies 85 kilometres south of Frankfurt.
Authorities pushed an alert on the Katwarn app telling people in Mannheim to avoid the city’s downtown area due to a big police deployment. Katwarn is used by officials to communicate information about major emergencies such as thunderstorms, militant attacks or fires.
Police in Mannheim, about 85 kilometres south of Frankfurt, say one person is dead and one person is in custody after a driver went into a crowd. Few details have been provided around the number of injured or the state of the investigation.
Security has been a key concern in Germany following a string of violent attacks in recent weeks, including deadly car rammings in Magdeburg in December and in Munich last month, as well as a stabbing in Mannheim in May 2024.
Across Germany, many people took a long weekend off to celebrate carnival, including Rose Monday, when several cities hold parades. Mannheim’s street parade, however, already took place, on Sunday.
