2 dead after truck crashes into crowd
BERLIN: Two people were killed and about 20 injured on Saturday in Munster, in western Germany, after the driver of a small truck crashed into a group of people in the heart of the old city, police said.
The driver killed himself in the cab of the truck immediately after the crash, said Andreas Bode, a spokesman for Munster police. “What led to the act is still fully unclear and we are investigating in all directions,” he said.
Police also said they were investigating what they identified as a “suspicious item” found in the cab of the truck, but declined to give any further details. They ordered all residents of the inner city and reporters at the scene to clear out while they were investigating the item.
Herbert Reul, the interior minister of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where Munster is, said the driver was a German citizen.
Several German media outlets, citing unnamed security sources, reported that the driver had a history of psychological problems. According to the Suddeutsche Zeitung, a national newspaper, the man was born in 1969 and had come to the attention of authorities for psychological issues in 2014 and 2016.
Police repeatedly urged people on Twitter to stop speculating about the crash, insisting that it was too soon to determine its cause.
Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed her shock at the crash and pledged to do “everything possible to investigate the act and support families of the victims,” she wrote on Twitter.
While authorities refused to say anything about the motive of the driver or the reason for the crash, it evoked comparisons to the December 2016 truck attack on a Berlin Christmas market that killed 12 people.
Germany was targeted in several attacks by Islamist extremists in 2015 and 2016, and officials have expressed concern about people who have returned to the country after fighting for the Islamic State in Syria or Iraq. Officials with the country’s Federal Criminal Office believe that 980 Germans left the country to join the fight with the Islamic State.
But unlike the attack in Berlin, or the July 2016 attack on a crowd in Nice, France, the driver in Munster did not attempt to flee the scene.
Saturday’s crash occurred outside the Grosser Kiepenkerl, a restaurant on a cobble-stoned street in the center of the city that is popular with locals and tourists, police said. It is not in a pedestrian zone, but the area has sidewalks where people were sitting on a sunny afternoon, police said.
Images from Munster showed red-andwhite police tape and rows of police vans that cordoned off the old city. Authorities urged people to leave in order to allow access for emergency services.
“We are here. Please stay away from the Old City,” Munster police wrote on Twitter. “Respect the victims. First-responders are treating the injured.”
Germany’s interior minister, Horst Seehofer, said federal authorities were in contact with police in North Rhine-Westphalia.