Breaking: Afghan 'Asylum Seeker' Plows Car Into Crowd, Dozens Wounded, Toddler 'Fighting for Life'
A driver drove a car into a union demonstration in central Munich on Thursday, injuring at least 28 people including children, authorities said. Officials said it was believed to be an attack.
The suspect, an Afghan asylum-seeker, was arrested. 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.
Participants in a demonstration by the service workers’ union ver.di were walking along a street at about 10:30 a.m. when the car overtook a police vehicle following the gathering, accelerated, and plowed into the back of the group, police said.
Officers arrested the suspect after firing a shot at the car, Deputy Police Chief Christian Huber said. He added that at least 28 people were believed to be injured, some of them seriously. A damaged Mini was seen at the scene, along with debris including shoes.
The suspect was a 24-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker, Huber said. Bavaria’s state interior minister, Joachim Herrmann, said he was known to authorities in connection with theft and drug offenses, but he 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 simply terrible,” Bavarian Gov. Markus Söder 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.”
“It is suspected to be an attack — a lot points to that,” Söder added.
BREAKING:
The man who drove a car into a crowd in Munich, Germany is an Afghan asylum seeker who has previously been arrested numerous times for theft and drug dealing.
At least 20 people were wounded and a toddler is fighting for his life. pic.twitter.com/UrvP06dkmC
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) February 13, 2025
Mayor Dieter Reiter said he was “deeply shocked” by the incident. He said that children were among those injured.
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.
The Aschaffenburg attack followed knife attacks in Mannheim and in 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.
“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.”
The Bavarian capital will see heavy security in the coming days because the three-day Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of international foreign and security policy officials, opens on Friday.
Herrmann said authorities do not believe the car ramming was connected to the conference, but they still need to determine the motive.
The Western Journal has reviewed this Associated Press story and may have altered it prior to publication to ensure that it meets our editorial standards.
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