A driver drove a car into a union demonstration in central Munich on Thursday, injuring at least 28 people including children, authorities said. Officials said it was believed to be an attack.
The suspect was a 24-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker, police said.
The suspect, an Afghan asylum-seeker, was arrested. The incident follows a series of attacks involving immigrants in recent months that have pushed migration to the forefront of the campaign for Germany’s Feb. 23 election.
Participants in a demonstration by the service workers’ union ver.di were walking along a street at about 10:30 a.m. when the car overtook a police vehicle following the gathering, accelerated and plowed into the back of the group, police said.
Officers arrested the suspect after firing a shot at the car, deputy police chief Christian Huber said. He added that at least 28 people were believed to be injured, some of them seriously. A damaged Mini was seen at the scene, along with debris including shoes.
Bavaria’s state interior minister, Joachim Herrmann, said he was known to authorities in connection with theft and drug offenses, but didn’t give further details. The state’s justice minister, Georg Eisenreich, said a prosecutors’ department that investigates extremism and terror was looking into the case.
“It is simply terrible,” Bavarian governor Markus Söder told reporters at the scene. “We feel with the victims, we are praying for the victims — we hope very much that they all make it.”
Mayor Dieter Reiter said he was “deeply shocked” by the incident. He said that children were among those injured.
The Munich incident comes three weeks after a two-year-old boy and a man were killed in a knife attack in Aschaffenburg, also in Bavaria. An Afghan whose asylum application was rejected was the suspect in that attack, which propelled migration to the center of the German election campaign.
The Aschaffenburg attack followed knife attacks in Mannheim and in Solingen last year in which the suspects were immigrants from Afghanistan and Syria, respectively — in the latter case, also a rejected asylum-seeker who was supposed to have left the country.
