A 30-year-old Iraqi man arrested after a series of crashes on a Berlin road on Tuesday night is being investigated after what prosecutors called an Islamic extremist attack.
Six people were injured, three of them seriously, when the man’s car struck three cars along a strip of the highway of the German capital. He apparently targeted motorcyclists.
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“According to the current state of our investigation, this was an Islamist motivated attack,” the prosecutor’s office told German news agency dpa.
Investigators said there were indications that the man was suffering from psychological problems, according to Reuters. He turned out to have acted alone.
A car and a motorcycle were parked on Wednesday on the A100 motorway following an accident in Berlin, Germany. The city’s highway was still closed after a series of traffic accidents that were thought to be caused by one man. (Paul Zinken / dpa via AP)
Witnesses said the man stopped his car, a black Opel Astra, after the third accident and pulled out a box claiming there were explosives inside, local media reported. He shouted “Allahu akbar” or “God is great” when he got out of his car. Bild wrote every day he also shouted, “No one comes closer, or you will all die.”
Police arrested the suspect and found that the box contained only tools.
An investigator is working on the scene on Wednesday after several accidents on the A100 motorway in Berlin. According to the German news agency dpa, prosecutors say a series of crashes caused by a 30-year-old Iraqi man on the highway late Tuesday night was an Islamic extremist attack. (Paul Zinken / dpa via AP)
Prosecutors did not reveal the man’s identity, as is customary in Germany, but local media identified the suspect as Samrad A. He is being investigated for three counts of attempted murder.
The man is known to Berlin police, Tagesspiegel reports every day. He was born in Baghdad in 1990 and lived in a refugee camp in Berlin. In 2018, he was arrested for injuries to others and taken to an institute for mental health, according to the paper.
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The incident led to lengthy traffic congestion Tuesday night. Some 300 people sat for hours on the main road and received support from the German Red Cross, the Second Chamber of Berlin tweeted Tuesday night.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
