Today's Edition
MANNHEIM, GERMANY (AFP)
A man drove a car into a crowd in Germany on Monday, killing two people and seriously injuring five, police said, adding that a 40-year-old German man was arrested over the suspected attack.
Politicians and police treated the noon-time vehicle rampage in the southwestern city of Mannheim as a deliberate act. Germany has been shocked by two other deadly car-ramming attacks since December.
"Once again we mourn with the relatives of the victims of a senseless act of violence and fear for the injured," Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in a post on X, adding: "We cannot accept this." "This act is one of several crimes in the recent past in which a car was misused as a weapon," said the Baden-Wuerttemberg state interior minister Thomas Strobl.
He said the sole suspect in the case lived in the city of Ludwigshafen, which lies directly across the river Rhine from Mannheim but is in the neighbouring state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
Strobl added that investigators saw "no indication of an extremist or religious background" and that "the motivation could be rooted in the person of the perpetrator himself," suggesting psychological troubles.
The suspect was arrested and is being treated in hospital.
