BERLIN –
On Wednesday, a man drove a pedestrian car in a popular shopping district of Berlin and killed one person and seriously injured nine others, according to rescue services.
Police spokesman Thilo Cablitz said the man collided with people on a street corner around 10:30 a.m. before returning the car to the road and then crashing into a shop window around ‘an island beyond.
Six people were injured and their lives were seriously injured and three others were seriously injured, according to fire spokesman Adrian Wentzel. Police said more than a dozen people were injured.
Police did not immediately confirm reports from German media that the dead and injured were part of a school group, but said they “appeared to be together.”
It appears the driver was stopped by passers-by before he was quickly arrested by a police officer who was near the scene, Cablitz said. He said police are trying to determine if he deliberately drove pedestrians or if it was an accident, possibly caused by a medical emergency.
Police later tweeted that the driver was a 29-year-old German-Armenian living in Berlin. They did not give further details, and it was not immediately clear what he had told them during the interrogation.
A large number of rescue vehicles and rescuers rushed to the scene.
Berlin Mayor Franziska Giffey tweeted that she was “deeply shocked by this incident”.
German Interior Ministry spokesman Maximilian Kall said it was “too early” to say whether it was an accident or an intentional act.
British American actor John Barrowman, who was in a nearby store with his partner at the time of the accident, described the scene as a “carnage”. A large number of police and rescuers, including a helicopter, were at the scene, he said.
The incident happened at one end of the Kurfuerstendamm shopping promenade and next to Breitscheidplatz square, where an extremist carried out a vehicle attack on a Christmas market in 2016, killing 13 people.
In a 2019 incident in central Berlin, an SUV collided with a group of pedestrians and killed four people. The driver had suffered an epileptic seizure and veered off the sidewalk.
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Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report