Search for motive in van strike
Deadly incident in Germany came a year to the day after a truck attack in Stockholm
Aman and a woman were killed when a German man drove a van into a group of people sitting outside a restaurant in the old city centre of Muenster in western Germany.
Police have identified the two victims as a 51-year-old woman and a 65-year-old man.
Police also confirmed that the man who drove the van shot himself dead in the vehicle.
State Prosecutor Martin Botzenhardt said that the investigation so far led authorities to believe the assailant was “a 48-year-old man from Muenster”.
There were no leads as yet on a potential motive.
Twenty people were also injured, six of them seriously, when the vehicle ploughed into people seated at tables outside the Grosser Kiepenkerl eatery, a popular destination for tourists in the pretty university city.
Herbert Reul, Interior Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, home to Muenster, told German television the suspect was a German citizen and there was “no indication of an Islamist background”.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported in its online edition that the perpetrator was Jens R., 48, who resided some 2km from the crime scene.
Police were searching his apartment for explosives.
Broadcaster ZDF said that he had contact with far-right extremists, but there was no evidence thus far that he was a far- right extremist himself.
The Sueddeutsche Zeitung said the man had psychological problems.
The Interior Ministry in North Rhine-Westphalia would neither confirm nor deny the report.
Bild said police were searching for two possible additional suspects after witnesses said they had seen two people jump out of the van. Jens R. had no police record, the newspaper said.
But police said they were no longer looking for other suspects.
Andreas Bode, a police spokesman at the scene, said: “It’s far too early to speak of a [terrorist] attack right now.
“The investigation is ongoing. There was possibly a suspicious object in the vehicle, but the investigation is ongoing into what kind of object it is.”
The incident came one year to the day after a terrorist truck attack in Stockholm, Sweden, which killed five people.
A witness told Germany’s NTV: “There was a bang and then screaming. The police arrived and got everyone out of here.
“There were a lot of people screaming. I’m angry, it’s cowardly to do something like this.”
— DPA, AAP, Telegraph Group Ltd