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No evidence of terrorism in car attack
AMAN accused of driving into a school group in Berlin, killing a teacher and leaving others injured, appears to have a history of mental illness, prosecutors said.
A court ordered the man to be placed in a secure psychiatric hospital. He faces preliminary charges of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder.
However, a spokesman for the prosecutors office, Sebastian Buechner, said it is not clear whether the suspect could be held criminally responsible.
Investigators found medicines when they searched the man’s apartment and “a great deal speaks for paranoid schizophrenia” as the suspect’s diagnosis, Buechner said.
“What there isn’t is indications of any kind of terrorist background.”
Police also found two hand-written placards with “a very general reference” to the longrunning dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the NagornoKarabakh region but they appeared to be unrelated to Wednesday’s incident in the centre of Berlin.
Witnesses and police said a car drove into pedestrians on a popular shopping street.
A teacher with the school group from central Germany died, and nine people suffered serious injuries. In all, 31 people were injured, 14 of them students.
Police identified the suspect as a 29-year-old German-Armenian who lives in Berlin. They said he was driving his sister’s car and that passers-by detained him after he crashed into a shop window.
Berlin mayor Franziska Giffey said investigators were “trying ... to find out more from the partially confused statements he is making”.
Berlin’s top security official Iris Spranger told the state legislature that the suspect obtained German citizenship in 2015 and apparently had “psychological problems” in the past. He was known to police because of proceedings for suspected bodily harm, trespassing and slander but not for political or other extremism, she added.