Berlin — A driver drove a car into a group of people in central Munich on Thursday, injuring 30 people, including children, authorities said. Police said at least 30 people were injured and the suspect was believed to be a 24-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker. Officials said earlier that at least two of those injured were in a serious condition.
Bavarian governor Markus Söder said the incident, which took place at a square near downtown Munich around 10:30 a.m., was “suspected to be an attack.”
Police said on social platform X that the driver was “secured” at the scene and no longer posed any danger. A damaged Mini Cooper could be seen at the scene, along with debris including shoes. A man was seen being taken into custody. Munich police said the suspect will appear before a judge Friday.
The FBI is assisting German police in the investigation.
Peter Kneffel/picture alliance/Getty
Mayor Dieter Reiter said he was “deeply shocked” by the incident. He said that children were among those injured.
A demonstration by the service workers’ union ver.di was taking place at the time of the incident. It was not immediately clear whether demonstrators were among the injured.
The Bavarian capital will see heavy security in the coming days because the three-day Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of international foreign and security policy officials, opens on Friday. U.S. Vice President JD Vance is due to attend the conference, where he’s scheduled to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy amid the ongoing full-scale Russian invasion of his country.
The incident comes less than two months after a man rammed a truck through a crowd at a Christmas market in the eastern city of Magdeburg, killing five people and wounding more than 200 others. The German government said the tragedy would have been hard to prevent and that the suspect appeared to be mentally disturbed.
Prosecutors in the eastern German city of Dresden said, meanwhile, that a suspect was being held in a foiled plot to attack a shelter for asylum seekers. They said they had “received an anonymous tip-off that a 21-year-old German man from the Meissen area had armed himself with explosives to carry out an attack on a shelter for asylum seekers in Senftenberg,” the AFP news agency reported.