Driver crashes into a crowd of people Mannheim perpetrator is mentally ill and has a criminal record
A 40-year-old German crashes into a crowd of people in the city center of Mannheim. Two people die and at least eleven others are injured. Find out what is known about the crime here.
03.03.2025, 22:40
03.03.2025, 22:48
dpa
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- On Shrove Monday, a car driver crashes into a crowd of people in Mannheim.
- Two people are killed in the incident in Germany, eleven others are injured, some seriously.
- The suspect injures himself critically when he is arrested.
- The man is a 40-year-old German with a history of mental disorders.
In the city center of Mannheim, a man drives a car into a crowd of people. There are a lot of people out and about because it is Shrove Monday. According to investigators, an 83-year-old woman and a 54-year-old man were killed. Eleven people were injured, several of them seriously.
In the evening, the investigators released details of the background. According to them, there are indications that the 40-year-old German, who is said to have driven his car into a group of people, has a mental illness. The public prosecutor Romeo Schüssler said that they would therefore concentrate on this aspect.
Baden-Württemberg's Interior Minister Thomas Strobl had previously said that there were no indications of a religious or extremist background.
The police assume that the man deliberately targeted his victims. It quickly became clear that the incident in Mannheim was a targeted drive in which several people were deliberately hit, said Mannheim's police chief Ulrike Schäfer.
Suspect injured in hospital
The suspected perpetrator was arrested shortly after the death drive and is in hospital. During his arrest, the man is said to have shot himself in the mouth with a blank-firing pistol. Corresponding media reports were confirmed by the President of the State Office of Criminal Investigation, Andreas Stenger. The 40-year-old's state of health is currently stable, but he has not yet been questioned.
The public prosecutor's office is accusing the landscape gardener of two counts of murder, among other things. The man had already attracted the attention of the authorities in the past, albeit with minor offenses. There were a few previous convictions dating back a long time, said Schüssler. These involved an assault for which he had served a short prison sentence over ten years ago, as well as a case of drunk driving.
The last offence was a hate speech offence from 2018, for which he had posted a comment on Facebook and had therefore been sentenced to a fine. No further information was initially available.
Raced several hundred meters through the shopping street
According to eyewitness reports, the man is said to have sped his car along the main shopping street, which is several hundred meters long, and hit or knocked down several passers-by. A carnival market with dozens of food stalls and rides is currently taking place in Mannheim city center.
According to the police, the shopping street was not secured with bollards or barriers. There was no particular reason for this. "It was a completely normal day in the city life of Mannheim", said Police President Schäfer, referring to the fact that no special event was scheduled there on Monday.
In the evening, top politicians from the federal and state governments visited the crime scene. Baden-Württemberg's Minister President Winfried Kretschmann expressed his condolences to the victims and their families. "This is really hard to bear and endure," he said.
He assured the citizens that the state was doing everything it could to protect them. But there can be no such thing as one hundred percent protection. "Sometimes it's just tragic and bad."
Interior Minister: "Can't turn our inner cities into fortresses"
There will never be absolute security, said Baden-Württemberg's Interior Minister Thomas Strobl (CDU). "We can't turn our inner cities into fenced-in fortresses either." He added that the crime was one of several recent crimes in which a car had been misused as a weapon.
Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser thanked the police and the emergency services. "The police did an outstanding job," said the politician in the evening after she had visited the scene. Around 30 police officers were on the scene in ten minutes, said Faeser.
Now it was time to let the investigating authorities do their work. It was a terrible act, "a horror in broad daylight, in beautiful weather, during the lunch break, when many people are outside".
Similar acts again and again
The case is reminiscent of several attacks in which vehicles drove into crowds of people in Germany in recent weeks. In December 2024, six people were killed in Magdeburg when a doctor raced through the Christmas market. In mid-February, a man drove his vehicle into a group of demonstrators in Munich. A young woman and a child were killed.
At the end of May last year, the suspected Islamist Sulaiman A. also injured five participants at a rally organized by the Islam-critical citizens' movement Pax Europa (BPE) and a police officer with a knife on the market square in Mannheim. The 29-year-old police officer Rouven Laur later succumbed to his injuries. Another officer shot the attacker.
