A car drove at high speed into a pedestrian zone in the southwestern German city of Trier on Tuesday, killing at least four people including a young child and seriously injuring up to 15 others before the driver was stopped by police, officials said.
The driver, identified as a 51-year-old German man from the area, was arrested at the scene and the vehicle was impounded, Trier police said.
The man appears to have been suffering from "psychiatric problems", Prosecutor Peter Fritzen said. Early indications "suggest that psychiatric problems possibly played a role," he told reporters, adding the driver was also under the influence of alcohol at the time.
Prosecutors are considering requesting that he be placed in psychiatric care, Fritzen added.
Rhineland-Palatinate state Governor Malu Dreyer, who comes from Trier, said earlier the dead included a young child and condemned it as a “brutal act”.
“It was a really, really terrible day for my hometown,” Dreyer told reporters after visiting the scene.
Police said the driver appeared to have ploughed into pedestrians indiscriminately as he drove through the city centre shortly before 2pm.
Roger Lewentz, the state interior minister, commended security forces on their reaction, saying that they had stopped the car and taken the suspect into custody within four minutes of receiving the first call.
Footage from the scene showed people outside a shop apparently helping someone on the ground lying among scattered debris.
Terrible and shocking
“It was simply terrible,” Trier Mayor Wolfram Leibe told n-tv television after visiting the site.
Leibe said the perpetrator “drove through the pedestrian zone, clearly at high speed, and killed several people and injured several, some of them seriously”.
The driver was alone in the car, police said.
The area was being kept shut down until at least Wednesday morning for police to collect evidence, but there was no longer any danger, Leibe said.
In a video posted by a local media outlet purportedly showing the arrest, police could be seen pinning a man down on the sidewalk next to a car with Trier licence plates. The authenticity of the video could not immediately be verified and it was taken down shortly after police tweeted a request that people do not share photos and videos of the scene.
Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert, tweeted that the scene was “shocking”.
“Our thoughts are with the relatives of those killed and with the numerous injured, and with everyone currently on duty caring for them,” he said.
Trier is about 200 kilometres (120 miles) west of Frankfurt near the border with Luxembourg. The city of about 110,000 people is known for its Roman gate, the Porta Nigra which is near the scene of the incident, and as the birthplace of Karl Marx.
(FRANCE 24 with AP)
