A 37-year-old mother and her two-year-old daughter have died from injuries they sustained when an Afghan national rammed a car into a crowd in a horrific attack in Munich on Thursday.
Prosecutors had said on Friday that at least 39 people were injured, some of them critically, when the car ploughed into trade union activists demonstrating for higher pay.
The mother and child were among those taken to hospital with serious injuries after the attack and are the first fatalities.
Authorities said they were treating the incident as a religiously motivated attack.
The car-ramming has brought security issues back into focus in campaigning for Germany‘s federal election on February 23.
The attack also came hours before the arrival of international leaders in the southern German city for the annual Munich Security Conference.
Footage from the scene captured the moment the driver was arrested, as cops swarmed the vehicle and pinned him to the ground.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in a message on X that he was ‘deeply shocked and saddened by the death of the small child and the woman who succumbed to their injuries after the attack in Munich’.
‘It is unimaginable what the relatives are going through. My deepest condolences go out to them. The country mourns with them.’
Farhad N., the 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker, was due to appear before a judge yesterday afternoon, a day after he drove the Mini Cooper into a crowd of striking unionists.
Gabriele Tilmann, the senior public prosecutor, said that Farhad had confessed during an interrogation to deliberately driving into the demonstration.
Police said that Farhad had an ‘Islamist orientation’ but was not affiliated with any Islamist groups.
The prosecutor said that he had prayed after driving his car into the crowd and uttered the words ‘Allahu Akbar’ to police officers.
A two-year-old child was left fighting for their life when the car hit a mother pushing a pram, local media reports.
‘The suspect came to Germany in 2016 as an unaccompanied minor and was here legally,’ Tilmann said this morning. He was said to have lived in a rented apartment in Munich while working as a store detective. Farhad was born in Kabul in 2001, Bild reports.
Police are still working to uncover a motive for the attack on the Verdi labour union demonstration. Initial findings have not uncovered any evidence the suspect collaborated with anybody else.
‘We will continue to investigate the perpetrator’s personality,’ Tilmann said, noting that Farhad would be questioned further following the initial two-hour interrogation. Bavarian police will also be sifting through the Farhad’s phone communications.
Early analysis indicates he had pre-planned the attack; police uncovered in one chat with a relative that he had said: ‘Tomorrow I won’t be here anymore.’
According to German newspaper Spiegel, he is said to have uploaded Islamist posts online before the crime.
Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said Farhad’s asylum application had been rejected in 2016, when he arrived in Germany.
