CAR PLOWS INTO A SCHOOL GROUP IN BERLIN
A car plowed into a crowd of people on a busy Berlin sidewalk on Wednesday, killing a female teacher on a school trip and injuring 14 teenage students traveling with her, before crashing into the window of a store near the site of a devastating 2016 terrorist attack, police said.
Five of the victims have life-threatening injuries, a Fire Department spokesman said.
The police identified the driver as a 29-year-old German man of Armenian origin who lives in Berlin. Iris Spranger, a Berlin state senator who oversees the police, wrote on Twitter that “according to the latest information,” the attacker was “a mentally impaired person.”
Passersby apprehended the driver at the scene and turned him over to the police, said Thilo Cablitz, a Berlin police spokesman. He said the police knew of no motive, but were investigating whether the crash was accidental or intentional.
“Part of the reconstruction of the event, of course, is to look at the extent to which this was an intentional act or a traffic accident that may have occurred because of an exceptional medical situation,” Thilo Cablitz, a Berlin police spokesman, told reporters on the scene.
Referring to the 2016 attack, Cablitz said: “It is a wound that still gapes in the heart of the city. Everyone remembers it.” He added that the police had since then increased security and their response tactics, although he declined to elaborate.
The crash occurred at 10:26 a.m. on a street in a busy shopping district in the west of the German capital, according to initial police reports. The driver first drove onto a sidewalk and into a group of pedestrians, then back onto the street, only to drive back onto the sidewalk and into the front of a store, according to witness accounts.
“The crime scene stretches over two blocks, about 200 to 300 meters,” said Adrian Wentzel, a spokesman for the Berlin fire brigade. The police said that 130 rescue workers were on-site.
The woman killed was a schoolteacher from the western state of Hesse who was in Berlin with her class, Spranger said at a news conference. It was not clear if any people other than the 14 students were injured.