Suspect in police custody after Trier car incident

TRIER: A 51-year-old man suspected of killing five people including a baby as his car tore through a busy shopping street in the German city of Trier has been remanded in police custody, prosecutors said on Wednesday.

The prosecutors had said the suspect, who was under the influence of alcohol at the time of the incident on Tuesday afternoon, could be placed in psychiatric care.

But a judge ruled on Wednesday that he should be placed in custody, though no details were given of a possible motive.

The suspect, a native of the quaint city of Trier in Germany’s Rhineland-palatinate state, is accused of five counts of murder and 18 counts of attempted murder, the judge said.

He is accused of tearing through the pedestrian zone in a silver SUV, killing five people including a nine-week-old baby and injuring 18 others, six of them seriously.

The victims also included three women aged 25, 52 and 73 and a 45-year-old man — the father of the baby who was killed.

The suspect was arrested at the scene and police were able to question him but said there were no indications of a religious or political motive.

Hundreds of people gathered on Wednesday morning around Trier’s Porta Nigra Roman city gate to pay tribute to the victims, despite coronavirus restrictions.

“Let us maintain this solidarity that I am experiencing here, right now, in the weeks and months to come,” Trier mayor Wolfram

Leibe said. Rhineland-palatinate state premier Malu Dreyer condemned the “terrible event here in this beautiful city”.

“Nothing, really nothing, can justify this brutal and terrible act,” she said.

Separately, a Stuttgart court on Wednesday sentenced a German man to prison for his involvement with the Daesh militant group, but cleared him of plotting to attack a skating rink.

Dasbar W was arrested in December 2017 for allegedly planning to drive into crowds at an ice rink in Karlsruhe.

The court found insufficient proof to convict him for the alleged plot, but handed Dasbar W. five and a half years in jail for his links with the IS group.

Born in Germany, Dasbar W moved with his parents to their home country of Iraq in 2006.

He returned to Germany in 2014 and a year later made contact in online chat groups with other Daesh sympathisers.

He travelled back to Iraq in June 2015 and began acting as a middleman between a high-ranking Daesh member and a prominent imam in Erbil.

Prosecutors said he returned to Germany after receiving an order from the Daesh contact to carry out an attack — but he failed to execute the task as two French students sharing an apartment with him warned the police.