At least two people including a baby were killed and up to 15 injured when a speeding car ploughed into a pedestrian area in the western German city of Trier.
Witnesses said people screamed in panic and some were thrown into the air by the car as it crashed through the shopping zone on Tuesday.
“We have arrested one person, one vehicle has been secured,” police said, adding that a 51-year-old German suspect from the Trier area had been overpowered within minutes of the incident and was now being questioned.
Mayor Wolfram Leibe, who rushed to the scene, said fifteen people had been injured, some of them with the most severe injuries”.
“I just walked through the city centre and it was just horrible. There is a trainer lying on the ground, and the girl it belongs to is dead,” he told a news conference, with tears stopping him from speaking further.
He told broadcaster N-TV that people who saw the incident were “totally traumatised” and the street “looks a bit like after a war”.
Leibe said he did not know the motive for the incident, which shocked residents of Germany’s oldest town, founded by the Romans more than 2,000 years ago.
Steffen Seibert, a spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel, said the incident was “shocking.”
“What happened in Trier is shocking. Our thoughts are with the relatives of the victims, with the numerous injured and with everyone who is currently on duty to care for the victims,” Seibert said on Twitter.
Germany has tightened security on pedestrian zones across the country since a truck attack on a Berlin Christmas market in 2016 that killed 12 people and injured dozens.
In October 2019, a man opened fire on a synagogue in the city of Halle. After failing to get into the building he went on a rampage outside, killing two people.
In February this year a racist gunman killed nine migrants in Hanau near Frankfurt before killing his mother and himself. Only about a week later, a local man ploughed his car into a carnival parade in the town of Volkmarsen, injuring 61.