The car-ramming that injured at least 36 people in Munich, Germany, on Thursday ahead of a major security conference featuring world leaders and defense leaders, was an intentional attack and is being treated as Islamic extremism, authorities said Friday.
Gabriele Tilmann, a senior public prosecutor, told a news conference in the city that the unidentified suspect admitted in a police interview that he drove into the crowd purposefully.
“The reason that he gave could be summarized as a religious reason. I can’t say more about it, but what he said would lead us to conclude that it was a religious motive,” she said.
“We don’t want to jump to any conclusions, but given what has happened we would assume this was an Islamic extremist attack,” she added. After his arrested on Thursday the suspect prayed, she said.
The suspect, a 24-year-old Afghan national, was arrested on suspicion of 36 counts of attempted murder, as well as grievous bodily harm and reckless driving.
He drove a white Mini into a crowd of 1,500 people marching through central Munich, as part of a trade union demonstration. This was not linked to the security conference, police said.
The security conference is a high-profile annual meeting that discusses geopolitical matters. This year the summit is dominated by the course of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are speaking at the event.
Tilmann also said that there is no evidence so far that the suspect is part of any Islamist organization or was working with any accomplices. Detectives had only just started investigating digital evidence from his phone and various social media accounts, where he posted about his Islamic faith and fitness regime. Police have searched his apartment but didn’t find any evidence linked to the attack.
German lawmakers lay flowers a the site of the car attack in Munich on Friday.
The suspect was an asylum-seeker with legal right to remain in Germany, who lives in Munich and came to the country in 2016 as an unaccompanied minor, police said. He was known to authorities “from investigations in which he was a witness due to his previous work” as a store detective, Munich police said in a statement Thursday. He has no previous convictions.
Those injured range in age from 2 to 60 years old and were all taking part in the trade union march.
At least eight people were seriously injured, including a child, Christian Huber, deputy chief of police, told the news conference. The number of injuries is not exhaustive, police said, as there might be more who have sought health care privately.
Huber told the news conference that officers who were accompanying the march opened fire at the vehicle but did not hit the driver nor an unidentified passenger.
There will now be an investigation into the use of firearms, a standard procedural response.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
