Baden-Württemberg The Mannheim fatality - what is known about it
Once again, a car crashes into a crowd of people in a German city. Once again, there are fatalities. And once again Mannheim is in shock - after a fatal knife attack on a police officer there last year. Horror and grief are likely to dominate the day after the bloody deed. The most important facts about the fatal drive through the pedestrian zone:
04.03.2025, 04:16
SDA
The crime scene
The crime took place in the heart of Mannheim, the second-largest city in Baden-Württemberg with around 320,000 inhabitants - on the Planken, the main shopping street. According to the police, the street was not secured with bollards or barriers because there was no reason to do so. The streetcar runs along there and delivery traffic also has access to the street, says Mannheim's police chief Ulrike Schäfer. "It was a completely normal day in Mannheim city life."
The sequence of events
On Rose Monday, many people are out and about on the Planken, the sun is shining and passers-by are visiting the carnival market with dozens of food stalls and rides. At 12.15 pm, a float races at high speed through the pedestrian zone, hundreds of meters away. At Paradeplatz, the car hits several passers-by. Investigators are convinced that the driver deliberately steered towards his victims. The police arrest him a short time later. In the end, the crime scene is littered with debris. The driver's small black car is also left completely demolished.
The perpetrator
He is a 40-year-old German from Ludwigshafen (Rhineland-Palatinate). The man was a landscape gardener. It is not known whether he had a job at the time of the crime, says public prosecutor Romeo Schüssler. He was single, had no children according to the investigators' initial findings and was not in a relationship. It is assumed that he was single, according to Schüssler.
The man has several previous convictions. The public prosecutor reported an assault for which he had served a short prison sentence more than ten years ago, and there had also been a case of drunk driving. The most recent offense was a hate speech offense from 2018, when the man was sentenced to a fine for a Facebook comment.
He is now being investigated for two counts of murder and multiple attempted murders. When he was arrested, the man is said to have shot himself in the mouth with a blank-firing pistol. He is in hospital. The officers hope to be able to question him on Tuesday.
The motive
According to the investigators' findings so far, the death drive had no extremist or religious background. The motivation could rather be based on the perpetrator's personality, explained Baden-Württemberg's Interior Minister Thomas Strobl (CDU). According to the police, it was a targeted drive in which several people were deliberately targeted. The public prosecutor's office referred to indications of a mental illness on the part of the perpetrator, which is why the investigators are concentrating on this aspect.
The victims
An 83-year-old woman and a 54-year-old man died in the death drive. There is no evidence that children were involved, said the President of the State Office of Criminal Investigation, Andreas Stenger. According to the police, eleven people were injured, several of them seriously. All of the injured were taken to hospital.
The consequences
Mannheim is in shock after the death drive. Three large department stores in the city center remain closed on Tuesday. Singer Maite Kelly canceled a concert in Mannheim planned for Wednesday out of respect for the victims. In addition, several carnival parades planned for Tuesday in Baden-Württemberg were canceled - not only directly in Mannheim, but also in Heidelberg and Schwetzingen in the Rhine-Neckar district, among others.
The reactions
Numerous politicians such as Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) and CDU leader Friedrich Merz expressed their condolences. During a local visit, Strobl admitted that there will never be complete security. "We can't turn our city centers into fenced-in fortresses either," he said. Minister President Winfried Kretschmann (Greens) assured the citizens that the state was doing everything in its power to protect them - and still emphasized: "This is really hard to bear and endure."
Expressions of solidarity also came from abroad: French President Emmanuel Macron assured people of his country's support. "To all the people in Mannheim, especially to the families of the victims of this act of violence, to the German people. France stands by your side," he wrote on X.
