Car rams into crowd at ‘high speed’ in German city of Mannheim
Germany is reeling in the aftermath of its third deadly car ramming attack since Christmas. Police say the death toll could rise as the suspected motive behind the incident is revealed.
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A 40-year-old man has rammed a car into a crowd of people killing two and leaving 11 others injured in Germany.
The driver ploughed a small black Ford passenger vehicle through a downtown pedestrian shopping area at around 12:15 local time where a carnival market was located with dozens of food stalls, rides and games.
Surveillance video showed the car accelerating down the tourist boulevard.
An 83-year-old woman and a 54-year-old man were killed and 11 injured, some of them seriously, authorities said.
Police arrested the man at the scene and are treating the midday vehicle rampage in the southwestern city of Mannheim as a deliberate act.
The suspect had several previous convictions, including being fined in 2018 for “hate speech” after he posted a comment on Facebook next to a far-right image, prosecutor Romeo Schuessler said.
Officials confirmed reports the man shot himself in the mouth with a blank-firing pistol as he was being arrested and was taken to hospital for treatment.
His condition was described as stable but police had not yet been able to question him.
Germany has been shocked by two other deadly car-ramming attacks since December.
“Once again we mourn with the relatives of the victims of a senseless act of violence and fear for the injured,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on X, adding: “We cannot accept this.” “This act is one of several crimes in the recent past in which a car was misused as a weapon,” said the Baden-Wuerttemberg state interior minister Thomas Strobl.
He said the sole suspect lived in the city of Ludwigshafen, which lies directly across the river Rhine from Mannheim but is in the neighbouring state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
Mr Strobl added that investigators saw “no indication of an extremist or religious background”, while prosecutors said there were “concrete indications” the perpetrator was suffering from a mental illness.
Police with heavy weapons soon shut down and evacuated the inner city as helicopters flew overhead and citizens were told to stay indoors via warning apps during the “life-threatening situation”.
‘Pools of blood’
Enes Yildiz, 24, who works in tax consulting at a nearby office, said: “I just heard a very, very loud noise. It was rather extraordinary, not a noise that you hear every day.”
He went down to the street and saw a dead body lying on the ground and pools of blood, he said.
The motionless victim appeared to have been thrown through the air by the impact.
“There were a lot of people crying, people shouting for help, people calling the police.”
He walked further down the street to witness the carnage at the city’s central Paradeplatz: “It was a mess, as if it had been hit by a bomb. The whole place was in disarray.”
Mr Yildiz saw more victims lying in the street, he recounted.
“I was shocked. I grew up here, I work here every day. I walk along the route where it happened every day.”
An unverified image of a woman’s severed leg, still wearing its stocking, circulated on X as social media users decried “another terrorist attack.”
“It’s heartbreaking,” cafe owner Kasim Timur, 57, was quoted as telling news site Der Spiegel, adding that one of his staff members had seen seriously injured people, among them children.
“We only see wounded people and the dead person, and we don’t know what to do,” a shopkeeper was quoted as saying by the local daily Mannheimer Morgen.
The man in the car rushed at breakneck speed into the crowd today in Mannheim just seconds before the massacre of the innocents. pic.twitter.com/i5uZTqq4tB
— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) March 3, 2025
A reporter at the scene for news channel NTV said that “at least one person is lying covered under a tarpaulin” and that children’s shoes were among the clothes and debris scattered on the ground.
Spate of attacks
Last month a man drove a car into a trade union rally in the southern city of Munich, killing a two-year-old girl and her mother. Police arrested a 24-year-old Afghan suspect.
In December, a car-ramming attack targeted a Christmas market in the eastern city of Magdeburg, killing six people and wounding hundreds. Police arrested a Saudi man at the scene.
Mannheim itself was the scene of a stabbing attack at an anti-Islam rally in May in which a policeman was killed and five others wounded.
A Syrian man is now on trial over that attack, which took place around 300 metres from the latest car ramming.
Amid the spate of attacks, which fuelled support for the far-right AfD party, Mr Merz pledged a “zero tolerance” law-and-order drive and tough restrictions on irregular immigration.
Authorities were on high alert Monday, which was the high point of traditional German carnival celebrations before the beginning of Lent.
Mannheim had seen thousands take to the streets on Sunday for its own carnival parade.
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser cancelled her visit to the Rose Monday parade in Cologne to travel to Mannheim, where she condemned the act of “horror in broad daylight” and the “simply unimaginably terrible act that happened here”.
Mannheim, a picturesque and historic city on the Rhine river, was the scene of a stabbing attack at an anti-Islam rally in May in which a policeman was killed and five others wounded, with a Syrian man now on trial over the attack.
Authorities were on high alert as Monday is the high point of traditional German carnival celebrations before the beginning of Lent.
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said before the incident in Mannheim that festivities were taking place “with high security precautions”.
Minister Faeser cancelled her visit to the Rose Monday parade in Cologne to travel to Mannheim.
Security was a major theme in last month’s general election, which was won by the centre-right CDU/CSU under Friedrich Merz.
Amid the spate of attacks, which fuelled support for the far-right AfD, Merz pledged a “zero tolerance” law and order drive.
Merz’s party is now in talks with the Social Democrats of outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz to form a new coalition government.
– With AFP
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Originally published as Car rams into crowd at ‘high speed’ in German city of Mannheim
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