Police shoot suspect in German car attack


(MENAFN- Gulf Times) A man drove into a crowd standing by a bakery in the southwestern German town of Heidelberg yesterday, injuring three people.
A police spokesman said it was not yet possible to say whether it was a terrorist attack.
Police said in a statement that one of the injured was seriously hurt.
The suspect was seen getting out of the car with a knife and was later tracked down to near a swimming pool.
He is now in a hospital in Heidelberg having been shot by police while being arrested, leaving him seriously injured, they said.
Regional newspaper Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung said he was not fit to be questioned.
Investigations by the public prosecutors' office in Heidelberg and the town's criminal police were continuing, police said.
Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung cited police as saying that the suspect was a young German man.
German daily Bild reported that the suspect was suffering from psychiatric troubles, but authorities have made no comment on that claim.
The newspaper said the suspect had stopped at a red traffic light and when it turned green put his foot down before hitting the group of people at high speed and crashing the vehicle into a pillar.
The German authorities are on high alert after a failed Tunisian asylum-seeker, Anis Amri, drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin on December 19, killing 12 people.
He was killed four days later in a shootout with police outside Milan.
The Berlin carnage evoked memories of the July truck assault in the French Riviera city of Nice, where 86 people were killed by a Tunisian Islamic State group-sympathiser.
Meanwhile, Italy has deported two Tunisian asylum-seekers who have been classed as a danger to national security, the interior ministry in Rome said yesterday.
One of the two deportees is thought to have been in contact with Amri.
The 44-year-old is thought to have met the prospective attacker in June 2015 while staying with another man from Tunisia.
That man has since landed in jail in Italy.
After arriving in Italy as an asylum-seeker in 2011, Amri spent four years in jail for various offences.
It is unclear whether he fled from Berlin to Italy in the wake of the attack because he still had contacts in his former host country.
The Italian interior ministry says that 147 suspected extremists have been deported from the country since January 2015.




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