MUENSTER– The man who drove a camper van into a group of people sitting outside a restaurant in the German city of Muenster on Saturday acted alone and appears to have had mental health problems, the regional interior minister said on Sunday.
The man killed two people when he ploughed the vehicle into people seated at tables outside the Grosser Kiepenkerl eatery, a popular destination for tourists in the old town of the university city in western Germany. He then shot himself dead.
“We now know it was in all likelihood a lone perpetrator, a German,” Herbert Reul, interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, home to Muenster, told reporters.
“There are lots of indications the person in focus had (psychological) abnormalities. This must be carefully investigated,” he said after paying his respects to the victims with national Interior Minister Horst Seehofer and state premier Armin Laschet.
Police said on Sunday they were still investigating possible motives and forensic investigators were scouring the scene of the attack for clues.
Seehofer described the attack as a “cowardly and brutal crime”. He, Laschet and Reul laid flowers in central Muenster and paid their respects to the victims of the attack.
“We have again experienced that ... absolute security is unfortunately not possible,” Seehofer said, adding that the government would do everything possible to protect citizens.
Police said the perpetrator was aged 48. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported in its online edition that he was Jens R., who resided some 2 km (1.2 miles) from the crime scene.
A 51-year-old woman from the Lueneburg area in northern Germany and a 65-year-old man from the Borken area near Muenster were killed.
Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a statement she was “deeply shaken”. In the months prior to the Berlin assault, Germany suffered a number of small-scale Islamist militant attacks, which some linked to Merkel’s decision in 2015 to open the country’s borders to an influx of migrants, many of them refugees from conflicts in the Middle East.
Saturday’s attack in Muenster came a year to the day of a truck attack in Stockholm in which a suspected Islamist militant sympathizer links killed five people.
On Saturday evening, the White House issued a statement sending U.S. President Donald Trump’s “thoughts and prayers” to the families of those killed.
French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted: “All my thoughts are with the victims of the attack in Muenster. France shares in Germany’s suffering”.
Friends Read Free