A man is under arrest and several people are seriously injured, including at least one possibly killed, after a ‘black SUV’ was driven into a crowd of people in a German city on Monday morning.
Several people are injured, some seriously, and at least one person was laid under a bloodied sheet — presumed deceased — in the city of Mannheim on the Rhine in Baden-Württemberg on Monday morning. Police have ordered the public to keep away from the area, a large deployment of emergency services is underway and a helicopter was landed in a square near the incident in the city centre.
Mannheim has a mirror city on the opposite bank of the Rhine — Ludwigshafen in Rhineland-Palatinate — and a local newspaper of this twin community Die Rheinpfalz reports eyewitnesses who spoke of a “rampage” by the alleged driver and of at least one fatality. The Stuttgarter Zeitung states: “debris was visible at the scene and at least one person was lying covered under a tarpaulin”.
03 March 2025, Baden-Württemberg, Mannheim: Emergency services and police stand at Paradeplatz in Mannheim after a serious incident. Photo: Dieter Leder/dpa (Photo by Dieter Leder/picture alliance via Getty Images)
National newspaper Bild reports their sources who state a black SUV was driven into a crowd of people “at high speed” and that the driver was subsequently arrested.
Police have yet to make any comment on the cause of this incident or whether there is any known motive. Nevertheless, the driving of a vehicle at high speeds into crowds is something that has become all too familiar in German cities in the past decade, and just in recent weeks there have been other such incidents.
As previously reported, a little before Christmas a Saudi Arabian ‘doctor’ ploughed through crowds at a Christmas Market in the Cathedral Square, Magdeburg. Five were killed, including a child, and hundreds injured.
Then in February, two people were killed and dozens injured when an Afghan migrant drove a car into a crowd in Munich. Again, one of those killed was a young child. In both attacks, the perpetrators were what might be called model migrants, men who had superficially integrated into society and who had jobs, a difficult new development for intensely pro-mass-migration European governments, coming from a situation where hitherto those drawn to violent extremism had tended to be loners, criminals, and failed asylum seekers on the fringes of society.
This story is developing, more follows
