A driver rammed a truck into a crowded Christmas market in the heart of the German capital, killing at least 12 people and injuring nearly 50. Police authorities said it was an intentional act. Chancellor Angela Merkel said authorities believe it was a terror attack.
The truck smashed into the popular Christmas market filled with tourists and locals outside the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church near Berlin's Zoo station late Monday.
"Our investigators are working on the assumption that the truck was intentionally driven into the crowd at the Christmas market on Breitscheidplatz," Berlin police said on Twitter.
Merkel said she was "shocked, shaken and deeply saddened."
"There is still a lot that we don't know about this act with sufficient certainty," she told reporters. "But we must, as things stand, assume it was a terrorist attack."
Numerous German media reported that the suspect, who was picked up about 2 kilometers (1½ miles) from the crash site, was a Pakistani citizen.
Footage showed the suspect, his head covered in a white sheet, being pushed into a police car shortly after the attack.
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| The wrongfully identified suspect being arrested |
Berlin's public radio station RBB-Inforadio cited security sources saying the man entered Germany on Dec. 31, 2015. News agency dpa, also citing unnamed security sources, said he came to Germany as a refugee in February 2016. Berlin's Tagesspiegel newspaper reported that the man was known to police for minor crimes.
Police declined to comment on the reports, referring questions to federal prosecutors who said they would hold a news conference Tuesday afternoon. But Merkel, who has been criticized for allowing in large numbers of migrants, addressed head-on the possibility that an asylum-seeker was responsible
But in an odd twist, the authorities have confirmed they caught the wrong guy. The armed killer is still on the run and the cops have the wrong man, German anti-terror chiefs have admitted.
Senior police confirmed: “We have the wrong man.”
A 23-year-old Pakistani man named as Navid B was arrested over the atrocity but had no blood or gun residue on his clothes, denied any knowledge of the attack and is believed to be innocent, the sources added.
In a terrifying warning to the German people, they told newspaper Die Welt: “We have a new situation. The true perpetrator is still armed, at large and can cause further damage.”
Witnesses described seeing a man flee the cab of the battered lorry before being pursued by a local man who directed police towards the suspect
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| The truck |
The Polish owner of the truck had said he feared the vehicle may have been hijacked. Ariel Zurawski said he last spoke with the driver, his cousin, around noon, and the driver told him he was in Berlin and scheduled to unload Tuesday morning. "They must have done something to my driver," he told TVN24.
The lorry's Polish driver Lukasz Urban, 37, was later found to have been shot dead and was in the passenger seat.
His cousin Ariel Zurawski, who identified Urban, said: "His face was swollen and bloodied. It was really clear that he was fighting for his life."
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