One person has died and at least eight have been injured (five of them extremely seriously) in a multiple hit this Wednesday in one of the most important commercial arteries of Berlin, in the Charlottenurg neighborhood.
According to the police press officer, Thilo Cablitz, “it is unknown at this time if it was an intentional act or a traffic accident.” The driver of the vehicle, a Renault Clio, was arrested by the police at the scene. He is a 60 year old man. He is the only detail of this individual released so far.
According to the police report, at around 10:30 a.m. the car overran the sidewalk near Rankestraße, where the Kurfürstendamm shopping artery turns into Tauentzienstraße, running over pedestrians. He then returned to the Tauentzienstraße carriageway, and again to the sidewalk, to charge into a shop window near Marburger Straße, where he stopped.
The images of the scene of the accident show the Renault Clio embedded in a store of the Douglas drugstore chain, in front of the Europa Center.
The area has been cordoned off to facilitate the work of the numerous emergency teams and mobilized firefighters. “There are currently around 60 troops at the scene or on the way to it,” tweeted the fire department, which initially spoke of 30 injured. The police, for their part, have deployed more than 130 troops, many of them heavily armed. A rescue helicopter landed in the median of the Tauentzienstraße.
The police have asked for citizen collaboration and have asked witnesses to “send information and multimedia files about the event” to their information portal. The authorities have also urged not to distribute images of the scene on the Internet.
Although the causes of this multiple outrage are unknown, the alarms were unleashed in the collective subconscious, given that it occurred in the vicinity of the Breitscheidplatz square, where in December 2016 the Tunisian jihadist Anis Amri deliberately crashed a stolen truck into a popular street market Christmas and killed 13 people of various nationalities. Since then, the Gedächtniskirche square has been protected with concrete blocks and candles burn in memory of the victims at the foot of the church.
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