Driver in Muenster van atrocity a German
MUENSTER: The man who drove a camper van into a group of people sitting outside a restaurant in the German city of Muenster on Saturday acted alone and appears to have had mental health problems, the regional interior minister said yesterday.
The man killed two people when he ploughed the vehicle into people seated at tables outside the Grosser Kiepenkerl eatery, a popular destination for tourists in the old town of the university city in western Germany. He then shot himself dead.
“We now know it was in all likelihood a lone perpetrator, a German,” Herbert Reul, Interior Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, told reporters.
“There are lots of indications the person in focus had psychological abnormalities. This must be carefully investigated,” he said after paying his respects to the victims, together with national Interior Minister Horst Seehofer and State Premier Armin Laschet.
There was no evidence of any link to Islamist militancy and the suspect was not a refugee, Reul said.
Broadcaster ZDF said police were searching his apartment and that he had contact with far-right extremists, but there was no evidence thus far that he was a far-right extremist himself.
In Berlin in December 2016, a Tunisian whose request for asylum was turned down, and who had links to Islamist militants, hijacked a truck and ploughed into a crowded marketplace.
Twelve people, including the man driving the truck when it was hijacked, were killed.
Police said yesterday they were still investigating possible motives, and forensic investigators were scouring the scene for clues.
Seehofer described the attack as a “cowardly and brutal crime”. He, Laschet and Reul laid flowers in central Muenster and paid their respects to the victims of the attack.
Police said the perpetrator was aged 48. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported in its online edition that he was Jens R, who lived some 2km from the crime scene.
A 51-year-old woman from the Lueneburg area in northern Germany and a 65-year-old man from the Borken area near Muenster were killed.
Chancellor Angela Merkel said she was “deeply shaken”. In the months prior to the Berlin assault, Germany suffered a number of small-scale Islamist militant attacks, which some linked to Merkel’s decision in 2015 to open the country’s borders to an influx of migrants, many of them refugees from conflicts in the Middle East.
Saturday’s attack in Muenster came a year to the day of a truck attack in Stockholm, in which a suspected Islamist militant sympathiser killed five people. – Reuters