At least two people have been killed and several injured after a car rammed into a crowd on a busy shopping street in the German city of Mannheim.
One man has been arrested following the incident on a pedestrianised street, where a market had been put up for carnival season. Several people were seen lying on the ground after the incident on Monday lunchtime and an elderly woman and 54-year-old man were killed.
The suspect arrested was a 40-year-old German man from the nearby state of Rhineland-Palatinate, interior minister of Baden-Wurttemberg state Thomas Strobl said. He faces charges for two counts of murder and multiple attempted murders.
Police and prosecutors said they don’t believe the suspect had any political or extremist background, adding they believe he has psychological problems.
At a press conference, the authorities said the suspect shot himself in the mouth when he was arrested and is currently being treated for his injuries in hospital.
Heavily armed police swarmed Mannheim’s central square Paradeplatz and cordoned off the surrounding area. Authorities also seized the car used in the incident.
Police confirmed that 10 people were injured; five suffered serious wounds while another five had minor injuries. They said: “No statement can yet be made about the extent and severity of the injuries in those affected.”
At the press conference, police and prosecutors said earlier reports that children were in hospital following the incident were incorrect.
Eyewitnesses reported seeing a driver knocking over several pedestrians on Planken, a central shopping street in Mannheim linking Paradeplatz and the Wasserturm monument around 1km away.
The incident occurred as crowds gathered in cities across Germany for parades to mark the carnival season. A carnival market has been underway in Mannheim’s city centre since Thursday, with 60 food stalls and rides.
One stall holder at the market said, according to MM: “It is terrible here, nobody knows what happened, you only see injured people and the dead, and you don’t know what to do.”
The carnival parades and markets planned for Tuesday have been cancelled and Lord Mayor Christian Specht ordered mourning flagging at the municipal service buildings. They city will host an “ecumenical devotion” across the Catholic and Protestant church on Tuesday at 5.30pm.
BILD newspaper has reported that it was a black SUV which was seen driving into the crowd.
German interior minister Nancy Faeser cancelled her participation in a street parade in Cologne due to the events in Mannheim. She would later call the incident “A horror in broad daylight”.
She said: “In the most beautiful weather during the lunch break, when many people are outside, in the middle of a pedestrian zone. This is simply an unimaginably terrible act that happened here.”
It comes just weeks after a car drove into a crowd of people in Munich, killing a 37-year-old woman and her two-year-old daughter, and leading to the arrest of Farhad Noori, the Afghan asylum seeker suspected to be behind the attack.
Security has been a major concern for the German population and was a hot topic in the recent German elections, which saw success for the country’s right-wing and far-right parties.
In May 2024, five people were injured and a police officer was killed in a stabbing at a rally hosted by an anti-Islam group, just 200m away from the site of Monday’s incident.
