At least two people were killed and several were injured in the southwestern German city of Mannheim after a motorist intentionally drove his car into a crowd of people, police and public prosecutors said Monday evening.

The suspect was detained following the incident, said the interior minister of the state of Baden-Württemberg, where Mannheim is located.

Authorities identified the suspect as a 40-year-old German man from the from the neighboring state of Rhineland-Palatinate. He is under investigation for murder and attempted murder in the attack that injured at least 11 others.

They said the driver shot himself in the mouth when he was arrested and had to undergo medical treatment at a hospital. He could not yet be questioned.

A senior public prosecutor said the man was suffering from psychological problems and that investigators were looking into that aspect more closely. 

Mannheim car ramming treated as an intentional attack

Law enforcement officials ruled out a political motive in the attack but said the suspect had a criminal record that included a short prison sentence that dated back to a decade ago.

The man also paid a fine in keeping with hate crime laws of the country for a comment he made in 2018 on social media platform, Facebook. 

Officials said they did not know whether the suspect, who has no children or a partner, was employed at the moment.

Attack comes amid carnival festivities

Several cities across Germany were holding parades on Monday to mark the carnival season. Mannheim's main parade took place on Sunday.

German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser canceled her participation in a carnival parade in Cologne and visited the scene of the attack in Mannheim.

 

Merz says country ought to become 'safe again' 

"My thoughts are with the victims and their families," Germany's likely future chancellor, Friedrich Merz, wrote in a post on social media X.

"The incident — like the terrible acts of the past few months — is a stark reminder that we must do everything we can to prevent such acts," he said, adding that “Germany must become a safe country again." 

Following the incident, Christian Specht, Mannheim’s Lord Mayor, ordered the flags on municipal buildings to be lowered to half-mast. 

"This horrific, inhuman attack on peaceful people has deeply shocked us all," Specht said.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier expressed his "deepest sympathy" for the relatives of the victims.

"It is terrible what they have to go through," Steinmeier said via his spokeswoman on X.

Mannheim car ramming attack at major downtown square

The incident took place at Paradeplatz, a major square in the downtown area, at around noon.

Police initially announced that one person had been killed in the incident. But the state interior minister later raised the death toll to two. 

Authorities sent an alert on the Katwarn app to tell the public in Mannheim to avoid the city center. The app is used by officials to communicate information about major emergencies. 

The Mannheim University Hospital said it had implemented an emergency plan in case of a possible mass casualty incident, according to the DPA news agency.

 

Car ramming attacks rise in Germany

In recent months, two major attacks involved vehicles hitting crowds in German cities. 

Monday's incident comes just weeks after two people were killed in a car ramming in Munich. Prosecutors said the suspect, who came to Germany as an asylum-seeker, seemed to have an Islamist motive. 

In December, a car drove into a Christmas market in the eastern city of Magdeburg, killing six people and injuring 200. The suspect was a Saudi doctor who had expressed anti-Muslim views and support for the far-right Alternative For Germany (AfD) party.

Edited by: Jenipher Camino Gonzalez