One person killed and 30 injured after car drives into crowd in Berlin shopping district

At least one person has died and 30 injured after a vehicle drove into a crowd of people in Berlin, officials said.

Police said the incident which took place around 10.30am happened near the popular Kurfuerstendamm shopping boulevard in the west of the German capital. It is not yet clear whether the crash was intentional.

“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 the suspect was being held at the scene.

“We are currently on the scene with about 130 emergency personnel,” police added. “The vehicle, a small car, was secured on site.”

According to the German newspaper Bild the man had been driving a Renault Twingo.

According to eyewitnesses the driver initially ran away but was captured by passers-by and handed to police, Bild reported.

Police spokesman Thilo Cablitz told Associated Press that the man drove into people on a street corner before getting the car back on the road and then crashing into a shop window.

A spokesperson for Berlin’s fire service told Reuters around 30 people were injured.

Actor John Barrowman said he was at the scene of the crash and witnessed “dead bodies all over the place”.

In a video posted on Twitter, he said: “This is bad, this is serious. There’s multiple fatalities and hundreds of emergency services that are in the area.

“They’re blocking city block after city block… the cordon keeps expanding.”

The incident took place near the scene of a fatal attack in December 2016, when Anis Amri, a Tunisian failed asylum seeker with Islamist links, hijacked a truck, killed the driver and then plowed it into a crowded western Berlin Christmas market, killing 11 more people and injuring dozens of others.

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

Source: I News