A car ran over a group of people this Thursday in Munich, most of them participants in a protest organized by the Verdi union as part of a municipal strike. Police confirmed that 28 people were injured, two of them critically.
According to a police spokesperson, the vehicle, a Mini Cooper, approached the demonstration from behind, overtook the police cars escorting it, and plowed into those at the rear of the march. The driver, a 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker, was arrested at the scene.
“Anyone who commits crimes in Germany will not only be severely punished and sent to prison but must also expect that they will not be allowed to stay in Germany.” — Olaf Scholz, Chancellor
Bavarian President Markus Söder and Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter visited the attack site. Söder recalled the recent stabbing in Aschaffenburg, where an Afghan whose asylum had been denied killed a two-year-old child and an adult who tried to intervene. Regarding the incident in Munich, the Bavarian leader stated that it “was presumably an attack.”
The run-over occurred one day before the Munich Security Conference, an international security and defense forum that will be attended by around 60 world leaders, including U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The attack site is just one and a half kilometers from the hotel hosting the event.
The incident also comes amid a heated political debate in Germany, with snap elections set to take place in ten days and immigration being a key issue in the campaign. The far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has been gaining in the polls, has made anti-immigration policies a central part of its platform.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz responded firmly, demanding that the arrested suspect be punished to the full extent of the law and expelled from the country. “Anyone who commits crimes in Germany will not only be harshly punished and sent to prison but must also expect that they will not be allowed to remain here,” he stated.
This is the second deliberate vehicle attack in Germany in two months. In December, six people were killed in a similar incident at a Christmas market in Magdeburg. In that case, the perpetrator was a Saudi doctor who had lived in Germany since 2006. His motivation did not fit the usual pattern of Islamist radicalized migrant attacks, as he was actually a sympathizer of the German far-right.
