New Year’s Day vehicular attack in Germany ‘motivated by xenophobia’
A senior official in Germany says a man who rammed his car into a crowd of people in the early hours of New Year’s Day intended to kill foreigners with “xenophobic” motives.
The 50-year-old German national, who was not named, rammed his Mercedes into a group of people at a crowded plaza in the northwestern German town of Bottrop on Tuesday and injured four people, police said.
He escaped the scene but was stopped and arrested in the nearby city of Essen.
The interior minister of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Herbert Reul, said the attacker “deliberately drove into crowds of people... that were largely made up of foreigners.”
“There was a clear intention by this man to kill foreigners,” he added.
According to a police spokeswoman, Syrian and Afghan refugees were among those injured.
An earlier statement by police and prosecutors said the attack had been deliberate and “linked to the xenophobic views of the driver.”
Police said the driver also made racist comments after being arrested in Essen.
“In addition, investigators have preliminary information about a mental illness of the driver,” they said.
The man, police said, had steered his car at another passerby in the city overnight but the targeted individual had escaped unharmed. The driver also targeted people at a bus stop after fleeing the scene of that first attack but they were not injured, either.
Germany’s federal interior minister, Horst Seehofer, said the attack would be carefully investigated.
In April, a German man drove a van into a crowd in Muenster City, killing at least three people and injuring dozens. The driver, who had sought psychological help in the weeks preceding the attack, then reportedly shot himself dead.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s move to allow in over a million refugees — from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan — back in 2015, set off a rise in nationalist, anti-refugee sentiments among some in the country as well as in neighboring states, including Austria and Italy, where anti-establishment, far-right parties are now in power.
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