A man has admitted to purposefully driving into a crowd in the German city of Munich and authorities have determined an Islamist motive for the crime, a prosecutor said on Friday.
At least 36 people including a toddler were hurt on Thursday when the 24-year-old man, identified as an Afghan national, ploughed into demonstrators gathered in the city centre, putting security back in focus before next week’s federal election.
“He has admitted that he deliberately drove into the participants of the demonstration,” lead prosecutor Gabriele Tilmann said, adding that the suspect, under investigation on 36 counts of attempted murder, had spoken German in a two-hour interrogation.
“I’m very cautious about making hasty judgements, but based on everything we know at the moment, I would venture to speak of an Islamist motivation for the crime,” she added.
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Officers fired on the car after the attack, but the suspect was not hit. According to Ms Tilmann, he subsequently said the words “Allahu akbar” (“God is greatest”) and prayed in the presence of police.
[ Munich car attack: eerie echoes of other violent incidents in GermanyOpens in new window ]
The attack came hours before world leaders including US vice-president JD Vance and Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy arrived in the southern city for the Munich Security Conference, but police said there was no link between the two events.
Ms Tilmann said there was no evidence to suggest the suspect, identified as Farhad Noori, was affiliated with any Islamist or terrorist organisations.
She added that there was no indication of accomplices, but that investigators were evaluating his communications – mostly in Dari, a language spoken in Afghanistan – and items obtained during searches to ascertain whether anyone had prior knowledge of the crime or was involved.
A Munich court was to decide later on Friday whether Noori would remain in investigative custody.
German authorities say the Afghan national arrived in Germany as an unaccompanied minor in 2016, and that he was in Germany legally and had been working as a store detective.
Ms Tilmann said Noori had used social media to present himself as a bodybuilder and an athlete, and had also posted religious content.
He did not have any prior convictions and had not been due for deportation, deputy police chief Christian Huber said, correcting false police statements from the day before that were seized upon by conservative and far-right politicians.
That false information had been announced “in the chaos of the early hours”, he said.
Immigration and security issues have dominated campaigning ahead of the February 23rd election, especially after other violent incidents in recent weeks, with polls showing the centre-right conservatives leading followed by the far right.
In December, six people were killed in an attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg and last month a toddler and adult were killed in a knife attack in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg. Immigrants have been arrested over both attacks.
Responding to the Munich attack, CDU leader Friedrich Merz, the frontrunner to be Germany’s next chancellor, said security would be his top priority, while the far-right AfD, in second place in polls, focused on the suspect’s legal status in Germany. − Reuters
