Several dead as car drives into crowd in Germany’s Munster
MUNSTER (Germany): Three people have been killed and 26 injured after a vehicle ploughed into pedestrians in the German city of Münster, before the driver killed himself, local police said. The crash took place in front of the Grosser Kiepenkerl restaurant in the historic center of Münster.
A police spokeswoman in the western city told AFP that the driver of the vehicle, who has not yet been identified, “shot himself” after driving into a crowd of people in the western market city.Six of the injured are in a critical condition.Custom made shirts made smarter Custom made shirts made smarter Bombay Shirt Company.
Police also urged people to refrain from spreading “speculation” about the incident.
“We cannot speculate about the motive at this stage but it is clear that the man who committed suicide drove a light truck into a larger group of people today,” a Münster police spokesman said.
The regional police service warned people on Twitter to avoid the area as a mass police operation was deployed to the scene, including paramedics and helicopter units from the wider area of North-Rhine Westphalia.”There are dead and wounded, please avoid the area,” the police said.
According to the online edition of the Spiegel magazine, German authorities were “assuming” the incident was an attack, though there was no immediate offic ial confirmation of a motive.A spokeswoman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel said “our thoughts are with the victims and their families” who were killed and injured in the incident.
Images broadcast by German television showed several police and firefighting vehicles clustered around a street in the centre of the picturesque medieval city of 300,000 people.
While the crash has yet to be officially confirmed as an attack, the head of a regional police union, Erich Rettinghouse, told local media: “There has been a continuous, latent danger of an attack in the whole of Germany. Now it has sadly hit North-Rhine Westphalia, where we have so far been fortunate enough to be able to foil planned attacks and prevent assassinations.”Germany has experienced a number of terror attacks in recent years, including through the deadly use of vehicles.
Mass-selling daily Bild reported in its online edition that three people had died in the incident. It showed pictures of where police had cordoned off an area of the city.The incident evoked memories of a December 2016 truck attack in Berlin that killed 12 people.
In December 19, 2016, Tunisian national Anis Amri, 24, hijacked a truck and slammed it into a crowd of people at a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people and injuring 48.
Amri was shot dead by Italian police in Milan four days later after travelling through several European countries. The Islamic State (IS) group claimed responsibility for that attack.
IS also claimed several similar attacks in Europe, including a rampage along Barcelona’s Las Ramblas boulevard in August 2017 that killed 14 and left more than 100 injured.The deadliest such incident in recent years was in the French resort city of Nice in 2016, where a man rammed a truck into a crowd on France’s national July 14 holiday, killing 86 people.(With Agency Inputs ).
