MUENSTER, Germany — A delivery vehicle slammed into a crowd Saturday in an apparently deliberate attack in the German city of Muenster, killing three people and leaving 20 others injured, police said.
A senior German official says the perpetrator of an apparent deliberate act on Saturday was a German citizen. State Minister for Internal Affairs Herbert Reul told reporters Saturday night that nothing as of now suggests the German driver of the vehicle that plowed through a restaurant’s open-air terrace in the German city of Muenster had a connection with radical Islam, but he said investigators are still looking at the driver’s background.
The driver shot and killed himself, a police spokeswoman said.
Authorities are treating the incident as a deliberate attack, the spokeswoman said.
Muenster police spokesman Andreas Boden told local media that the motive and identity of the driver is unknown.
The attack happened in the old part of the western German city, an area popular on weekends.
The vehicle drove into a restaurant’s open terrace around 3:30 p.m. local time, according to police spokeswoman Vanessa Arlt.
Arlt said the old city remains closed, and police have asked people to avoid the city center.
Muenster, with about 300,000 people, is home to numerous universities and has a student population of about 58,000, the city government says. The city calls itself the cycling capital of Germany and says about 100,000 residents use a bike daily.
Ulrike Demmer, a spokeswoman for the German government, called news of the attack “horrible” on Twitter. “Our thoughts are with the victims and their loved ones,” she said.
Saturday’s crash occurred on the one-year anniversary of a similar attack in Stockholm, Sweden, where a stolen beer struck drove into pedestrians, killing five people.