A driver ploughed into people in a busy shopping area in the centre of the German city of Leipzig on Monday afternoon, leaving two people dead, authorities said.<\/p>\n
An additional three people were seriously injured in what officials believe was a deliberate rampage, Mayor Burkhard Jung said.<\/p>\n
He described it as \u201ca terrible tragedy\u201d.<\/p>\n
An unspecified number of people sustained less serious injuries.<\/p>\n
The driver, a 33-year-old German citizen, was detained in the car. Police said he was a German-born resident of the Leipzig area.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors said he is under investigation on suspicion of murder and attempted murder.<\/p>\n
There was no immediate word on a possible motive.<\/p>\n
The interior minister of Saxony state, Armin Schuster, said investigators believe the man acted alone.<\/p>\n
He said that rage and \u201cpsychological instability\u201d are often factors in such cases, but added that he wouldn\u2019t speculate on whether that was the case here.<\/p>\n
Police chief Rene Demmler said the man drove from the Augustusplatz, a major square, along the Grimmaische Strasse into the city\u2019s central pedestrianised shopping area. He stressed that there was no longer any danger.<\/p>\n
Mr Demmer said the driver was arrested in the vehicle and didn\u2019t resist arrest.<\/p>\n
Photos from the scene showed a car with a battered front and a shattered windshield after the incident, which happened at about 5pm.<\/p>\n
Leipzig is located southwest of Berlin and has more than 630,000 inhabitants, making it one of the biggest cities in eastern Germany.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A driver ploughed into people in a busy shopping area in the centre of the German city of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":468916,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-468915","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-featured-news","11":"tag-featurednews","12":"tag-headlines","13":"tag-latest-news","14":"tag-latestnews","15":"tag-main-news","16":"tag-mainnews","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-top-stories","19":"tag-topstories","20":"tag-world","21":"tag-world-news","22":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116519849511135493","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=468915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/468916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}