The vehicle approached from behind, accelerated, and drove into the end of the gathering, according to Merkur, citing police information. As a result, the police fired shots and arrested the driver.
It is suspected to be an attack, states Markus Söder, who leads the state government in Bavaria, at a hastily convened press conference on site, according to Bild.
This shows that something must change in Germany – and fast.
The suspected driver is said to be a 25-year-old man who is an asylum seeker from Afghanistan. The man is known to the police since before for, among other things, drug-related crimes.
Nearly 30 people are injured, several of them small children.
For several of them, the condition is serious, for some life-threatening, says Bernhard Peschke, spokesperson for the fire department, to AFP.
"Deeply shocked"
Images on social media show a demolished car and a large police and rescue operation. A German journalist writes on X that there was a union demonstration march on site, and according to Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), the injured are demonstrators.
The driver has been taken into custody and no longer poses a threat, confirms the police on X.
Munich's mayor Dieter Reiter says he is "deeply shocked".
The demonstration is connected to an ongoing strike in Munich, organized by the trade union Verdi, which, among other things, organizes public employees.
Security in the German city has been tightened due to an international security conference that begins there on Friday and will last over the weekend. On Thursday, among others, US Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj are expected to arrive.
Several attacks
Recently, Germany has been hit by a series of high-profile violent crimes and terrorist attacks with perpetrators from Afghanistan, which has become a major theme ahead of the election later in February.
On Thursday, the trial began against another Afghan man in his 25-year-old who is accused of killing a police officer and seriously injuring several others when he went on a rampage with a knife at a market in Mannheim last year. And three weeks ago, a mentally ill man, also from Afghanistan and of the same age, attacked a group of preschool children in Aschaffenburg. A two-year-old boy and another person were stabbed to death.
