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Five people including a baby were killed on Tuesday when a drunken man drove his car into a crowded pedestrian area in an apparently deliberate attack in the western German city of Trier.
The car was driven by a 51-year-old German from the Trier area. He was overpowered and arrested at the scene after officers rammed his car off the road to prevent further deaths.
The driver has not been officially named but several German newspapers identified him as Bernd Walter W from the village of Kordel, near Trier.
The arrested man has a history that suggests mental illness, a spokesman for prosecutors said.
He was drunk at the time of the incident, and had a blood alcohol level of 1.4 per thousand. He was homeless and living in his car.
The five killed in the incident are three women aged 73, 52 and 25, a 45-year-old man and a nine-month-old baby, all of whom were from Trier. The baby’s mother is being treated in hospital. “This is probably the darkest day Trier has faced since the Second World War,” Wolfram Leibe, the mayor of Trier, told a second press conference. “We cannot shirk this, we must face it.”
“I just walked downtown and it was just awful. It was a scene of horror. There’s a trainer lying there. The little girl it belonged to is dead,” Mr Leibe told a press conference, his voice breaking with emotion, before passing the microphone to a police spokesman, unable to go on.
Eyewitnesses described seeing a pram flying through the air after it was hit by the car., confirmed that a baby was among the victims.
Malu Dreyer, the regional prime minister of Rhineland-Palatinate said: “This is a very, very terrible day for my home town, Trier… Worst of all is that people have lost their lives.”
Witnesses described a silver-grey Range Rover swerving into the pedestrian zone at high speed and ploughing through people. “It looked like he was doing 100kmh (62mph),” one witness told NTV television.
