BERLIN — A car drove into a crowd of people in Berlin on Wednesday, killing one person and injuring a dozen others, some of them seriously, the police said.
The police have arrested the male driver of the car and started an investigation into whether the crash was accidental or intentional.
Thilo Cablitz, a Berlin police spokesman who confirmed the casualty numbers, said passers-by had apprehended the driver, who has not yet been identified. He was then taken into custody by the police. The police have no motive at this time, Mr. Cablitz said.
The police said on Twitter that 130 rescue workers were on-site.
The crash occurred at 10:26 a.m. on a street in a busy shopping district in the west of the German capital, according to initial police reports. The driver first drove onto a sidewalk and into a crowd, then back onto the street, only to drive back onto the sidewalk and into the front of a store, according to witness accounts.
According to news reports and photographs taken at the scene, the car, a Renault Clio with Berlin license plates, stopped moving after it crashed into the window of the store.
Several fire trucks and many firefighters were visible at the scene, with helicopters circling overhead. The police quickly roped off the area, which was near the location of a terrorist attack on a Christmas market in 2016.
The square has since been reinforced to safeguard it and protect the large numbers of people who pass through it every day. A medevac helicopter was seen lifting off from the area, normally a packed square filled with shoppers.
In the 2016 terrorist attack, 12 people were killed by an attacker who stole a truck and plowed it into a crowd of people. The attacker was later killed in a shootout with the police in Italy.
In 2018, two people were killed after the driver of a small truck crashed into a group of people in the heart of Münster’s old city, in western Germany. The driver killed himself in the cab of the truck immediately after the crash.
Two years later, five people were killed after a drunk 51-year-old German man zigzagged his S.U.V. for about a half-mile through a busy pedestrian shopping street lined with shops in the city of Trier, in the southwestern part of the country. The authorities said the man did not appear to be motivated by political or religious beliefs.
