German crash kills woman, injures more
BERLIN — A man drove a car into a German school group standing in a popular Berlin shopping district Wednesday, killing a teacher and seriously injuring nine people, authorities said.
The man drove into people on a street corner at around 10:30 a.m., got the car back on the road and then crashed into a shop window about a block away, Berlin police spokesman Thilo Cablitz said.
Berlin’s top security official, Iris Spranger, said the woman killed was a teacher on a trip to the German capital with students from a secondary school in the central German state of Hesse.
Six people suffered life-threatening injuries and another three were seriously injured, fire service spokesman Adrian Wentzel said. Police said the 14 students from Hesse were among those who suffered injuries of varying severity, but didn’t give a total tally.
The driver was apparently detained by passers-by and then arrested swiftly by a police officer near the scene, Cablitz said. Investigators were working to determine whether the man deliberately drove into the pedestrians or whether it was an accident, possibly caused by a medical emergency.
Police said the driver was a 29-year-old German-Armenian who lived in Berlin.
Spranger said posters were found in the man’s car “in which he expressed views about Turkey.”
In a later interview with regional public broadcaster RBB, Spranger said Germany’s domestic intelligence agency had no immediate information on the man and authorities were still checking whether he was previously known to police. She said the driver was in a hospital, “because we must of course immediately clarify whether he is ill, whether he took drugs and so on.”
“We can’t rule anything out at the moment … but there is no claim of responsibility,” Spranger said.
A memorial service for the people killed or hurt in Wednesday’s crash was held in the evening at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church on the Breitscheidplatz, next to the scene of the crash.