AT least one person was killed and around 30 others injured after a vehicle drove into pedestrians in Berlin.
The man drove into people on a street corner at around 10.30am before getting the car back on the road and then crashing into a shop window a short distance away, police spokesman Thilo Cablitz said.
Five people sustained life-threatening injuries and another three were seriously injured, fire service spokesman Adrian Wenzel told n-tv television. A spokesperson for the German capital's fire service told Reuters around 30 people were injured in total.
The driver was apparently detained by passers-by before being arrested by a police officer who was near the scene, Cablitz said. He added that officers were trying to determine whether he had deliberately driven into pedestrians or whether it was an accident, possibly caused by a medical emergency.
Police later tweeted that the driver was a 29-year-old German-Armenian who lived in Berlin. They did not give further details.
Large numbers of rescue vehicles and first responders were at the scene.
Berlin mayor Franziska Giffey tweeted that she was “deeply shocked by this incident”.
The incident happened at one end of the Kurfuerstendamm shopping boulevard and next to the Breitscheidplatz square, where an extremist carried out a vehicle attack on a Christmas market in 2016, resulting in 13 deaths.
In a 2019 incident in central Berlin, an SUV ploughed into a group of pedestrians in central Berlin, killing four people. The driver had suffered an epileptic seizure and veered onto the pavement.
