Dhe area around the Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church is cordoned off with a red and white ribbon. Police officers ensure that nobody enters the area. Ambulances from the fire brigade drive away with flashing lights and sirens. Dozens of police vehicles are parked on Tauentzienstrasse, a popular shopping street in western Berlin where Kurfürstendamm flows. The Zoo train station and the KaDeWe department store are very close by. It’s twelve o’clock in the afternoon. An hour and a half ago, at 10:26 a.m., a car drove into a group of pedestrians on the sidewalk. It was a group of schoolchildren visiting Berlin.
According to the police’s current knowledge, 14 students were injured, five or six of them life-threateningly, three others seriously – all were taken to the city’s hospitals. But for a woman any help came too late, she died at the scene. It is a 51-year-old teacher from Bad Arolsen in the Hessian district of Waldeck-Frankenberg. She had gone to Berlin with a tenth grader. The seriously and life-threateningly injured are mainly schoolchildren, including a teacher.
Scholz comments on the fact
After the fatal incident, the police, with the support of a special task force, searched the driver’s home. A police spokeswoman for the German Press Agency confirmed the operation in the Charlottenburg district, which the “Bild” newspaper had previously reported on. The police also had contact with the driver’s sister, it said. According to dpa information from police circles, the suspect should be mentally disturbed. The Berlin Senator for the Interior, Iris Spranger, also wrote on Twitter shortly before 9 p.m. on Wednesday evening: “According to the latest information, today’s events on Tauentzienstrasse are an amok act by a mentally handicapped person.”
Chancellor Olaf Scholz also spoke of an amok attack on Twitter late in the evening. “I am deeply affected by the cruel shooting on Tauentzienstrasse,” wrote the SPD politician on Twitter on Wednesday evening. “The trip of a Hessian school class to Berlin ends in a nightmare. We think of the families of the dead and the injured, including many children. I wish you all a speedy recovery.”
Passersby held the driver
According to the police, the driver of the car is a 29-year-old German-Armenian who lives in Berlin. He drove into the group on the sidewalk in a small car, a silver-colored Renault Clio – apparently at high speed, eyewitnesses report. This happened on the corner of Tauentzienstraße and Rankestraße opposite the Memorial Church. Then the man drove almost 200 meters further to Marburger Straße, steered the vehicle onto the sidewalk again, touched another car until he crashed his car into the window of a perfumery shop, where he came to a stop. The car was then partly in the branch of the Douglas chain, partly on the sidewalk. There were no other injuries in the store.