MONITORING (SW) – Two people – an 83-year-old woman and a 54-year-old man – have been killed after a vehicle drove into a pedestrian area in the city of Mannheim, western Germany.
Five people were seriously injured and another five suffered minor injuries in the incident, investigators said.
Authorities arrested a lone suspect, a 40-year-old German man, who is not believed to be linked to extremism but shows “concrete indications of mental illness”.
Germany has endured a number of violent attacks over the last year, which have left several people dead and hundreds injured.
Nine months ago, also in Mannheim and only a few blocks away from where Monday’s attack is believed to have taken place, an Afghan man stabbed several people, killing a policeman.
Then, in August, another knife attack left eight people injured and three dead in Solingen. The Syrian man who was charged with the crime was suspected of links with the Islamic State terrorist group.
In December a man rammed a car into a crowd at a Christmas market in Magdeburg, leaving six dead and 299 injured. A 50-year-old Saudi psychiatrist was arrested.
In January, a 28-year-old Afghan asylum seeker attacked a group of small children in a park in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg, killing a two-year-old child and a passer-by who tried to help the boy.
And in February, a 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker drove a car into a crowd, injuring more than two dozen people. A mother and child later died from their injuries.
Source: BBC
