Teacher killed and pupils wounded as car ploughs into pedestrians in Berlin

‘It is not yet known whether it was an accident or a deliberate act,’ say police

A teacher was killed and 14 of her pupils were among the injured on Wednesday after a car ploughed into pedestrians in a central shopping district in Berlin.

Six other people sustained life-threatening injuries and another three were seriously injured, fire service spokesman Adrian Wentzel told German media.

Berlin’s top security official, Iris Spranger, said the woman killed was a teacher on a school trip with students from the central German state of Hesse.

The driver of the Renault Clio car was arrested after passers-by detained him. He is male, said to be 29, known to police and German-Armenian.

The incident happened at around 10.30am, police said, near the popular Kurfuerstendamm shopping boulevard in the west of the German capital.

Investigators were looking into whether the incident was a terror attack or possibly an accident with a medical cause, a police spokesperson said.

“A man is believed to have driven into a group of people. It is not yet known whether it was an accident or a deliberate act,” police said, adding that bystanders had detained him at the scene before handing him over to authorities.

“It is too early to speculate about the background (of the incident),” an Interior Ministry spokesperson told a federal government news conference in Berlin.

Officials said an investigation was ongoing and denied a report by Bild newspaper that the driver had left a letter of confession in the car. Instead, investigators had found posters about Turkey, which has troubled relations with Armenia.

“We haven’t clarified everything yet,” Berlin’s mayor Franziska Giffey told reporters at the scene. Bild reported an investigator as saying: “(This was) by no means an accident – someone on the rampage, an ice-cold killer.”

Helicopters were deployed to take some of the injured to hospital. More than 130 emergency personnel worked on the scene, said officials.

Bild released a picture of the alleged suspect being detained, wearing a yellow pullover, jogging trousers and red trainers.

Blankets covered what appeared to be a body in a cordoned-off area guarded by police, Reuters images showed. A small, silver-coloured car was lodged inside a shop after smashing through a plate glass window.

Caught up in the incident was American actor John Barrowman, who took to Twitter to say the situation was “horrific”.

“I heard the bang and the crash when we were in a store, and then we came out and we just saw the carnage,” he said.

The nearby Europa Centre complex was later evacuated in case the crashed car contained explosives, police said.

“The federal government has of course learned of this terrible incident in Berlin today and is very concerned and distressed about it,” a government spokesperson said. “Our thoughts, our sympathy are with the injured and their relatives.”

The incident took place near the scene of the attack on 19 December 2016 when Anis Amri, a failed Tunisian asylum seeker with Islamist links, ploughed a truck into a crowded west Berlin Christmas market, killing 11 people and injuring dozens of others.

Amri then fled to Italy, where Italian police shot him dead.

A police spokesperson said that police had learned from the experience in 2016 in dealing with Wednesday’s incident.

“The wounds of 2016 are not healed, everyone remembers it,” police spokesperson Thilo Cablitz said.