Asylum seeker from Afghanistan on Thursday overthrew the Mini Cooper in a demonstration of the union in Munich, injuring more than two dozen people and adding growing tensions over immigration ahead of the German Chancellor’s choice next week.
Authorities believe that the collision at 10:30 was a deliberate attack by a 24-year-old, said Markus Söder, Governor of Bavaria, in which Munich is the capital of the capital. Police said the car had forwarded a police cruiser who followed the demonstrations and entered the crowd. Officers fired one shot while arrested a man.
The location of the collision was less than a mile than Munich’s safety conference, which opens tomorrow and attracts high participants and journalists from all over the world. Police do not think the collision was related to the conference. By the evening, the conference participants arrived, the streets were calm.
Germany takes place from a series of seemingly unrelated attacks performed by immigrants from Afghanistan and the Middle East over the past year. The memories are still fresh than car attack in DecemberWhen a man flew into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, central Germany, injuring as many as 300 people and killed six.
Last month, an Afghan immigrant with an apparent mental illness and who was scheduled for deportation killed a small child and an adult in a knife attack in the Bavarian park.
Leading Parties in the Chancellor elections, set for February 2nd. They all vowed to break migrants in varying degrees-a lot of the extremely right alternative to the German Party, known as the AFD, which is second to the polling station, and the conservative Christian Democrats, for which is predicted to end first.
Some political insiders on Thursday speculated that the attack could further raise the AFD, which surpassed 20 percent on the polls, focusing the voters even more on migration problems.
There were similar expectations that the attack in January in Bavaria would lure more voters of AFD, the party that all other parties in Parliament had long avoided parts that the German intelligence service had classified as extremist. But such bounced dialing was materialized.
The allies of the candidates of Christian Democrats for chancellors, Friedrich Merz, said on Thursday that they did not expect to lose supporters to AFD after the attack. They made the decision of Mr. Merz last month, after the Bavarian knife attack, to push the set of newly renovated migration members to vote in parliament.
This move was intended to show the voter that Mr. Merz and his party were seriously affected by action to reduce migration and respond to concern about public security. But it caused anger in the Bundestag, the Federal Parliament and Protests across the countrybecause Mr. Merz effectively broke through the taboo taboo in German politics against parties that are considered to be extreme. This is because Mr. Merz spent measures knowing that they could only pass by AFD votes.
Mr. Merz managed to adopt a symbolic measure but The second voice, on the changes of the migration law, failedwith several members of Mr. Merz’s party defect.
However, some of Mr. Merz’s allies suggested on Thursday that the episode effectively inoculated him and Christian Democrats against claims that they did not respond to voters for migration.
Political risks of the attack could be higher for the whispered chancellors, Olafa Scholz, whose social democrats are surveyed in the third or fourth in research.
In the campaign, G. Scholz used a more measured approach to migration. But on Thursday, he offered an aggressive response to an attack that emphasized how sensitive the subject of migration was – especially from Afghanistan and Syria – became.
The driver “must be punished and he has to leave the country,” said Mr. Scholz, who struggles to connect with the voters and is not expected to be re -elected Chancellor, while stopping the campaign in Fürth.
Mr. Scholz was supposed to participate in a television town hall on Thursday night with three other leadership chancellors: Mr. Merz, Alice Weidel of AFD Robert Habeck of the Green Party. Migration was already expected to be a controversial topic, but the attack further increased its visibility.
Photos and videos of the collision site showed a hard -to -recessed beige mini cooper on Thursday, which the police were confirmed to be drawn into the crowd.
The rescue helicopter and several emergency vehicles were on the spot for the victims – at least 30 injured, two of which are difficult – to the hospital.
Sandra Demmelhuber, journalist Bayerischer Rundfunk, Bavarian public television house, was on the scene and described the chaotic scene.
“There’s a lie on the street, and police have taken a young man. People sitting, crying and shaking around the ground,” wrote on x.
The demonstration was organized by Verdi, one of the largest German unions, who called a one -day strike for city workers. About 1,500 people were at a rally when the collision occurred, police said.
The man came to Germany in 2016 and failed his initial asylum request, but received an official status that allowed him to stay in the country in 2021, said Joachim Herrmann, State Minister of Internal Affairs in Bavaria. Mr. Herrmann also corrected earlier statements that the police knew the man as a buyer-in-a-scientist, he legally worked as a detective in a store for two private security companies.
Behind these details, however, he is not publicly identified.
The attack followed on the day the trial opened for an Afghan man who was accused of killing the death of a copAnd wounding several others, in Mannheim last spring.
Following a collision on Thursday, Mr. Söder – whose Christian social union, the regional sister party of Christian Democrats, has ruled Bavaria for decades – she did not lose the time of calling for action.
“It was not the first such act,” Mr. Söder said at the scene. “Today I feel compassion for people, but at the same time I am determined that something has to change in Germany and fast,” he added.
