Children
among the injured after car drives into German carnival
Police
refuse to rule out deliberate attack on parade in town of Volkmarsen
Jon Henley
Europe correspondent
@jonhenley
Mon 24 Feb
2020 17.49 GMTFirst published on Mon 24 Feb 2020 14.52 GMT
Dozens of
people have been injured, some of them children, after a local man appeared to
deliberately drive a car into a carnival parade procession in the central
German town of Volkmarsen, police have said.
The driver
was arrested but police could not immediately provide details about the man’s
motives, although Bild newspaper cited a spokesman, Henning Hinn, as saying
they were “working on the assumption that it was a deliberate act”.
There were
several dozen wounded, some with life-threatening injuries and several of them
children, Hinn said.
The interior
ministry in the state of Hesse said the driver, described by police as a
29-year-old German national from the local area, was not in a fit state to be
questioned. “Given the situation on the ground, a deliberate attack cannot
currently be ruled out,” a spokesperson said.
Police
vehicles and ambulances were at the scene. Police called off all carnival
parades in the state of Hesse as a precautionary measure, but said they were
not aware of any danger elsewhere in Germany.
The DPA
news agency said no deaths had been reported in the crash. Police had
previously said it was not clear whether mechanical problems, driver error or
illness were to blame, or whether the car had been intentionally driven into
the crowd.
Video
footage showed a locally registered silver Mercedes hatchback, its hazard
lights flashing, on a pavement outside a supermarket in the town, which has a
population of nearly 7,000 and is about 30km from Kassel, east of Düsseldorf.
Local media
cited witnesses as saying the car ploughed “at full throttle” about 30 metres
into the parade before it finally came to a halt, adding that driver had driven
round a traffic barrier and appeared to have deliberately targeted children. A
witness said the driver had accelerated after driving past the police barrier.
One
witness, Elmar Schulten, told Bild that he saw “many small children” on the
ground. Police had to protect the driver as carnival marchers, including
parents of some of those injured, rushed furiously towards him, Schulten said.
The
incident occurred on Rose Monday, the highlight of Germany’s annual celebration
of Carnival. Hugely popular in Rhineland cities such as Cologne and Düsseldorf,
tens of thousands of people dress up to attend street parades featuring comical
or satirical floats from which people play music and throw sweets.
It came
less than a week after a man shot dead 10 people before killing himself in the
same state, in one of the worst racist attacks in Germany since the second
world war. The gunman, who left behind a racist manifesto, first opened fire at
a shisha bar and a cafe in Hanau, killing nine people, before shooting dead his
mother and himself.
The rampage
fuelled concerns over Germany’s increasingly emboldened far right scene, after
a pro-migrant politician was murdered in June and an antisemitic attack on a
synagogue left two dead in the city of Halle last October.
Condemning
the violence in Hanau, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said the country
had to fight back against the “poison” of racism and hatred running through
German society. The interior minister, Horst Seehofer, promised to ramp up
security and put more police at mosques, train stations, airports and borders.
Thousands
of Germans later joined vigils to mourn the victims and call for more
protection for minorities. Many also used the occasion to vent their anger at
the far-right AfD party, which has been accused of stoking anti-foreigner
sentiment and normalising hate speech in recent years.
Germany’s
deadliest terror attack in recent history took place in 2016, when a failed
Tunisian asylum seeker drove a lorry into a crowded Berlin Christmas market,
killing 12 people. The attacker had pledged allegiance to Islamic State.
Additional
reporting by Philip Oltermann in Berlin
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