Horror at the shops
Driver ‘ran amok’ killing 4 plus baby
FIVE people, including a baby, were killed and several more were injured when a driver drove a Range Rover into shoppers in a German city.
Onlookers screamed in terror as the vehicle “zig-zagged” at speed through a pedestrian area in Trier, “throwing people in the air” and hitting a pram.
Police said a man drove the car for 1km “hitting people at random on his way” at around 1.45pm, before being by a patrol car. A suspect was filmed being pinned to the ground by police beside a damaged vehicle.
The dead included a nine-month-old child, two women, aged 25 and 45, and a 73-year-old man, all from Trier.
The mother of the baby was being treated in hospital with “numerous” others, four suffering severe injuries.
Karl-Peter Jochem, of Trier police, said a 51-year-old local man was being questioned. Prosecutors said the driver had drunk a “significant amount unt of alcohol” and “psychiatric problems roblems possibly played a role”. The man had no criminal record, was of no fixed address and was living in the borrowed car.
Trier mayor Wolfram Leibe broke down as he said: “We had a driver who ran amok. I just walked through the city centre and it was just horrible.
“There is a trainer lying on the ground, and the little girl it belongs to is dead.” He said witnesses were “totally traumastopped
tised”. Chancellor Angela Merkel s said: “My sympathy goes to the relatives of people who were torn from their lives so suddenly and forcibly.” Trier, in southwest Germany, had cancelled its Christmas market due to Covid, but the shops were open.
The incident brought back memories of the truck attack on a Berlin Christmas market which killed 12 people in 2016.