(Newswire.net — December 1, 2020) —
Several people are reported dead and many have been injured in a tragic incident in the south western German city Trier.
Tuesday afternoon in Trier’s city center local Christmas shoppers were interrupted by a vehicle driving at a high speed from the city’s famous Roman gate Porta Nigra. That area is normally used to set up a Christmas market in this time of year, but due to the Covid-19 pandemic only the local shops were open.
Police have confirmed at least two deaths and as many as thirty people were injured, but they later updated their statement to say that there were multiple dead in the incident. The authorities have asked people to avoid that area. Local police have also added that there was no longer any danger since they have apprehended the driver, a 51-year-old German man from the Trier-Saarburg area.
Trier is located near Luxembourg in Germany’s western Rhineland-Palatinate.
The mayor Wolfram Leibe was visibly shaken at a press conference and said: “We [had] a driver who ran amok in the city… I just walked through the city centre and it was just horrible. There is a trainer lying on the ground, and the girl it belongs to is dead.”
Karl Peter Jochem, a spokesman for the police said that the driver plowed through a pedestrian area in his SUV for a kilometer.
Police also asked people to stop the spread of disinformation and to not share pictures or video footage of the incident on social networks.
This incident brought back memories of what happened in 2016 in Berlin when a truck drove into a Christmas market killing 12 people.