Dozens injured in Munich, including children, after driver rams car into crowd

German police said a driver drove a car into a union demonstration in central Munich on Thursday, injuring at least 28 people, including children. Officials said it was believed to be an attack.

Participants were taking part in a demonstration connected to a strike organized by Verdi, the key trade union for Germany’s public sector. Demonstrators were walking along a street at about 10:30 a.m. when the car, a Mini Cooper, overtook a police vehicle following the gathering and accelerated, and the driver plowed into the back of the group, police said.

The suspect, who is believed to be a 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker, was arrested, according to Munich police director Christian Huber. The incident follows a series of attacks involving immigrants in recent months that have pushed migration to the forefront of the campaign for Germany’s Feb. 23 election.

Bavaria’s state interior minister, Joachim Herrmann, said the suspect was known to authorities in connection with theft and drug offences, but didn’t give further details. The state’s justice minister, Georg Eisenreich, said a prosecutors’ department that investigates extremism and terror was looking into the case.

“It is suspected to be an attack — a lot points to that,” Bavaria Premier Markus Söeder told reporters.

Officers arrested the suspect after firing a shot at the car, according to Huber. He said at least 28 people were believed to be injured, with some sustaining serious injuries.

The damaged Mini Cooper was seen at the scene, along with debris including shoes, water bottles and a stroller.

A witness, who said he saw the incident from a window of a neighbouring office building, saw the car had threaded its way between the police vehicles and then accelerated, he said. Another witness, who said she had seen part of the incident from a building, saw the car accelerate and hit several people in the crowd.

“It was fast enough to pull 10 to 15 people to the ground,” a witness named Alexa told Reuters.

She also described hearing one to two gunshots, which she believed came from police.

“It is simply terrible,” Bavaria Premier Söeder told reporters at the scene. “We feel with the victims, we are praying for the victims — we hope very much that they all make it.”

Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter said he was “deeply shocked” by the incident. He said children were among those injured.

The suspected attack also came hours before leading international figures, including U.S. Vice-President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, were in the city for the high-profile Munich Security Conference, which starts on Friday.

Bavaria’s interior minister said he did not suspect there was a connection between the conference and the suspected attack.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told the media that “this is not something we can tolerate or accept.”

He urged the judiciary to “use everything in their power” to bring charges against the suspect.

“Anyone who commits a crime in Germany will not only be severely punished and go to jail, but they also must understand they may not be able to continue to reside in Germany,” he said.

Scholz said the suspect “must be punished and must leave the country.”

The chancellor noted that his government deported convicted criminals to Afghanistan on a flight in August 2024 and is working to do so again — “and not just once, but continually.”

Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO, expressed “shock and sadness” at what he called an “attack.”

The Bavarian capital will see heavy security in the coming days because of the three-day Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of international foreign and security policy officials.

The Munich incident comes three weeks after a two-year-old boy and a man were killed in a knife attack in Aschaffenburg, also in Bavaria. An Afghan whose asylum application was rejected was the suspect in that attack, which propelled migration to the centre of the German election campaign.

The Aschaffenburg attack followed knife attacks in Mannheim and Solingen last year in which the suspects were immigrants from Afghanistan and Syria, respectively — in the latter case, also a rejected asylum seeker who was supposed to have left the country.

In the December Christmas market car ramming in Magdeburg, the suspect was a Saudi doctor who previously had come to various regional authorities’ attention.

Germany’s main opposition conservative bloc, in which Söder is a prominent figure, has demanded a tougher approach to irregular migration, calling for many more people to be turned back at the country’s borders and for an increase in deportations.

“This is more evidence that we can’t go from attack to attack and show dismay, thank police for their deployment,” Söder said. “We actually have to change something. This is not the first such act; so, we feel with the people today, but at the same time we are determined that something must change in Germany, and quickly.”

— With files from The Associated Press and Reuters