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At least five people died, including a baby. The police arrested a 51-year-old German, very drunk. The mayor spoke of a “gunman”, but the background is unclear.
Mayor Wolfram Leibe tried to hold back tears when he appeared on camera in Trier on Tuesday afternoon. The SPD politician previously took a photo of himself in the pedestrian zone of his city, which is the scene of the crime this Tuesday. “It was terrible,” says Leibe. “There are a pair of sneakers there. The girl with them is dead.”
Then the trembling voice of the city chief fails. Pass the mic. About an hour and a half earlier, a car had passed through the pedestrian zone of the city of 115,000 inhabitants in Rhineland-Palatinate, near the border with Luxembourg. The driver rammed the passersby with his off-road vehicle. At least five people died and more than a dozen were injured, some seriously. The youngest victim is a nine-month-old baby.
A 51-year-old German from the region was at the wheel. The police arrested the drunkard (1.4 parts per thousand alcohol in blood). Fought. The footage shows officers pushing him to the ground.
A kilometer of directed death drive
By 1:47 p.m., the police had received the first emergency calls from the picturesque city center of Trier. Germany is alone in a soft lockdown. Shops and schools were also opened in Trier. The uproar reportedly spread for a kilometer. The 51-year-old drove his car in “zigzag lines” to “deliberately inflict suffering,” as he was later called. The uproar ended near Trier’s landmark, the Porta Nigra, a city gate from Roman times.
The authorities declared a “special situation”. Residents were asked to avoid the city center. Although the go-ahead was soon given, the center remained a restricted area for pedestrians. Investigators got clues. Video recordings showed large numbers of emergency vehicles and barrier tapes waving. We see images of this type on television quite often. We believe that this cannot happen to us. Now it has happened, ”said the mayor of the city, which claims to be the oldest in Germany. He later said that the city center looked “like a war.” Eyewitnesses described dramatic scenes in the German media: people were thrown through the air.
No indication of political motive
The gunman has no criminal record. Apparently he had borrowed the gun, the car, from a friend and spent the last few days in it. Investigators initially had no evidence of a political motive. An initial investigation indicated a “possible psychiatric clinical picture,” according to the prosecutor. Of course, there was still no certainty. The man is being investigated for treacherous homicide.
In recent years, there have been several violent attacks in Germany that were later attributed to mental illness, including the one in Münster in April 2018: a 48-year-old German rammed people in a minibus. There were four dead and more than 20 injured. The driver then shot himself. The researchers later named the reason “temporary psychological instability.” But terrorists also use vehicles as weapons. Tunisian Anis Amri drove a hijacked truck at a Berlin Christmas market in 2016.
Rhineland-Palatinate Prime Minister Malu Dreyer (SPD) rushed to the crime scene in his hometown of Trier on Tuesday. Also in political Berlin, the eye turned to the southwest of the republic, to the border region with Luxembourg. “The news from Trier makes me very saddened,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU).
(red./strei)
