A car struck a crowd in a pedestrian area of central Leipzig in eastern Germany on Monday, killing two people and injuring others.
The driver of the vehicle, a 33-year-old German national, was detained shortly after and is in custody, police said in a statement. The exact number of injured wasn’t immediately known.
Michael Kretschmer, the prime minister of the Saxony region which includes Leipzig, referred to a “suspected rampage,” suggesting the man had deliberately driven into the crowd.
“We will do everything in our power to solve it quickly and completely,” Kretschmer, a member of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives, wrote in a post on social media. “The rule of law will be enforced with all due rigor.”
Germany has suffered a number of fatal incidents involving vehicles driving into crowds in recent years, increasing pressure on the government to boost domestic security.
An attacker drove into a Christmas market in Magdeburg in December 2024, killing six people and injuring hundreds more.
In February last year, a mother and her infant daughter were killed and around 40 people were injured — some seriously — after a car rammed into a labor demonstration in Munich.