Berlin car crash incident: what happened in Germany, how many people injured, was it a terrorist attack?

A teacher was killed and nine other people were seriously injured after a man drove a car into a German school group standing in a popular Berlin shopping district, authorities have said.

The driver hit people on a street corner at around 10.30am on Wednesday (8 June) before getting the car back on the road and then crashing into a shop window a short distance away, police spokesman Thilo Cablitz said.

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.

Five people sustained life-threatening injuries and another three were seriously injured, fire service spokesman Adrian Wentzel told n-tv television. Police said more than a dozen people had been injured in the incident.

The driver was reportedly detained by passers-by before being arrested by a police officer close to the scene, Mr Cablitz said.

Officers are strill trying to determine whether the man had deliberately driven into pedestrians or whether it was an accident, possibly caused by a medical emergency.

Police later tweeted that the driver was a 29-year-old German-Armenian who lived in Berlin.

Ms Spranger added that posters were found in the man’s car “in which he expressed views about Turkey”.

He had been driving a small Renault car, according to Germany’s Bild newspaper, and witnesses told the news outlet that the driver initially ran away and was stopped and handed over to police.

Footage of the scene showed the silver car had crashed into the window display of a department store.

The incident happened at one end of the Kurfuerstendamm shopping boulevard in the west of the German capital and next to the Breitscheidplatz square, where an extremist carried out a vehicle attack on a Christmas market in 2016, resulting in 13 deaths.

In a 2019 incident in central Berlin, an SUV ploughed into a group of pedestrians in central Berlin, killing four people. The driver had suffered an epileptic seizure and veered onto the pavement.

Was it a terrorist attack?

It is still unclear whether the incident was the result of an accident or whether the driver had intentionally driven into the crowd, police spokesman Martin Dams said.

Berlin mayor Franziska Giffey tweeted that she was “deeply shocked by this incident” and said that authorities were keeping an open mind about possible motives.

Dancing on Ice star John Barrowman, who witnessed the incident, said on social media that he believes he witnessed a terrorist attack.

He wrote on Twitter: “We think we have witnessed a terrorist attack here in Berlin.

“We’re not sure there’s a lot of people dead bodies all over the place.

“We’ve seen a car that came down the road and ended up in a storefront covering three city blocks it’s pretty horrific.”

In further video messages posted on Twitter, he continued: “It’s really pretty bad, guys. There are police behind us, there are other police cars coming. There’s helicopters coming in. This is bad. This is serious.

“There are hundreds of emergency services that are in the area, blocking city block after city block, off. The cordon keeps expanding.”

Barrowman, who was at the scene with his husband Scott Gill, later told Sky News that he saw “a dead person in the middle of the road, covered up”.

He said: “The person came on the pavement by the Levi store and the bank, then drove onto the street, hit the person and killed them in the street, then came back onto the kerb, went down the kerb, through the cafe area and then into the storefront.

“How horrible that this morning these people got up to just go through a regular day, they were going through their daily business. I mean we were shopping, but if you think if we’d have come out of that store one minute earlier...”

He added: “We are no experts but this looks intentional, by the way the car went on the pavement.”