Hours before the annual Munich Security Conference, Munich is feeling very insecure.
As darkness fell on Thursday an edgy silence hung over the empty Stiglmaier Platz, the latest stage for an attack both violent and familiar.
At least 28 people remain in hospital – including two children – after an attack with weary, eerie echoes of other violent attacks in Germany: a crowded public place, a speeding vehicle, a foreign national suspect who was known to police and whose deportation was overdue.
Just after 10.30am on Thursday, eyewitnesses say a white Mini overtook a police car at the back of a Verdi trade union demonstration and raced at 50km/h into a crowd of about 1,000 marchers, mostly teachers and their children.
Reform UK undergoes schism amid row linked to Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson
The secret history of Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa
More big EU decisions may come on defence as US shift on Ukraine causes Brussels to rethink bloc’s security
Syria’s interim president secures agreement with Druze and Kurds
By the time the car came to a halt, one eye witness said, seven people lay under it.
“Suddenly we heard engine roars behind us, the wheels were going crazy and then dull blows – bam, bam bam – probably from the bodies,” said local man Udo Kunte. “Then police oficiers immediately ran over and opened the door, pulled him out.”
The man was identified on Thursday as Farhad N, a 24-year-old Afghan national known to police for shoplifting and illegal drug use.
He reportedly came to Germany via Italy in 2016 as an unaccompanied minor and filed an asylum application in 2017. It was rejected and his deportation order has been enforceable – but not enforced – since 2020.
Munich mayor Dieter Reiter said it was “hard to find words on such a terrible day, the whole city is in shock”.
Bavaria’s police union chairman Jürgen Köhnlein had no trouble finding words, saying the attack left him “outraged”.
“Not just that this series of attacks on people in Germany has now hit home in Munich,” he said, “but because it’s not even possible for participants in a demonstration for better working conditions to move about safely.”
A leading Afghan organisation in Munich described the attack as “barbaric”. Its head Mohammad Imran Sedigi told the DPA agency “such people don’t belong in Germany, they are a danger for all of Germany but also for the Afghan community”.
The attack, 10 days before Germany’s federal election, could throw another wild card into an emotional campaign already dominated by growing public anxiety after a series of knife and car attacks involving asylum seekers and foreign nationals.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz described the attack as something “we can neither tolerate nor accept”.
“The justice system must use all available means to tackle this, the perpetrator must be punished and must leave Germany,” he said.
As opposition parties zeroed in on the suspect’s failed asylum application and overdue deportation, federal interior minister Nancy Faeser insisted Germany was doing more than any other country in Europe to deport Afghanistan nationals.
Germany deported 28 Afghan nationals last year, via a third country because Berlin has no diplomatic ties to Kabul’s Taliban leadership.
Asked why no further Afghan nationals have been deported, a federal interior ministry spokesman in Berlin said: “It is the federal states that are responsible for deportations.”
That knocked the ball back to Bavaria, where the state interior minister acknowledged the suspect had been ordered to leave Germany five years ago but “he could not be deported at present and was therefore allowed to stay on in our country”.
As police searched the suspect’s home on Thursday afternoon, a Taliban spokesman told Germany’s DPA news agency it was prepared to take back nationals on condition it was allowed open a diplomatic presence in Germany – a move Berlin has rejected to date.
