A 29-year-old man who killed a teacher on Wednesday and injured 14 children after driving his car against a crowd in Berlin had a history of paranoid schizophrenia and probably intended to kill or injure, according to German authorities.
“There are no indications of a terrorist motive behind the incident, and we can also rule out that it was an accident,” said Berlin prosecutor Sebastian Büchner. “It was probably a deliberate act.”
The Berlin prosecutor said the Armenian-German man’s history of mental health problems meant he was “probably” not legally responsible for his actions and would be placed in psychiatric care.
A teacher was killed and 14 children on a school trip were injured when the German-Armenian driver drove his silver Renault Clio onto the sidewalk of a busy shopping mile at around 10.30am local time (09.30 BST ) Wednesday. After returning to the main road, he crashed into the window of a cosmetics store.
He fled to a sports store, where shoppers detained him until police arrived. A witness told Der Spiegel magazine that the man had been in a confused state: “He repeatedly asked for help.”
The accident took place on Tauentzienstrasse in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, next to Breitscheidplatz, where a Tunisian asylum seeker rejected with Islamist ties drove a hijacked truck to a crowded Christmas market on 19 December 2016, killing 12 people and injuring dozens more.
Berlin Mayor Franziska Giffey told RBB on Thursday that the previous day’s incident had “shelled deep wounds and trauma”.
Police in riot gear stormed a rally on Friday, removing hundreds of protesters by truck.
In a statement on Tuesday night, the senator of the interior of the German capital, Iris Spranger, said that the latest information about the driver had made the incident look like “a commotion of a person with a very serious psychological disability “.
Spranger rejected initial reports that a written statement had been found in the driver’s car that could have pointed to an act of political or religious motivation.
Although police found a sign in the car criticizing Turkey for its role in the Armenian genocide during World War I, it was unclear whether it belonged to the driver or his sister, a registered owner of the vehicle.