Berlin crash: Attack on capital's streets was ‘cruel rampage’ – Scholz

The car crashed into a store

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has condemned Wednesday's attack on a busy Berlin street that left one person dead and 31 injured as a "cruel rampage".

Mr Scholz added that the attack, which was carried out by a 29-year-old man, had left him "deeply saddened".

Berlin's Mayor Franziska Giffey told local media the attack was "a dark day in the history of Berlin".

She added that the man, who remains in police custody, is "severely mentally impaired".

In a short statement issued on Thursday, police said they believe the attack was "an intentional act" by the "allegedly mentally ill 29-year-old". It added that he had been travelling in his sister's car.

Local media has reported that the suspect, who has been identified as a German-Armenian man who lives in the city, is co-operating with investigators. However, Ms Giffey cautioned that he has made a series of "confused statements".

The Berlin state prosecutor said on Thursday that there does not seem to be a terrorism link, and that the man appeared to displaying signs of paranoid schizophrenia.

The man's sister told the German tabloid Bild that he suffers from "serious problems" and Berlin's top security official, Interior Minister Iris Spranger, said the "evidence suggests this is a case of a mentally ill person running amok".

The prosecutor has recommended the man be held in a psychiatric institution until his trial.

Ms Spranger said posters were found in the car used during the attack "in which he expressed views about Turkey", but she refuted an earlier report from Bild that a letter of confession had been found in the car. She said the reasons behind the crash will be investigated in detail by officials.

Almost all those injured were students who were on a school trip to celebrate finishing their exams. They had travelled from the small town of Bad Arolsen, in the central Hesse region of Germany. Seven of them were severely injured, but are not out of danger, the state prosecutor said.

The woman who died has been identified as their schoolteacher. Another teacher remains in a critical condition and is said to be fighting for his life.

A district administrator in Hesse, Jurgen van der Horst, told Bild that "everyone in Bad Arolsen is affected" by the tragedy.

"It's a big school in a small town," Mr van der Horst said. "Everyone knows everyone here and has contact with the families impacted."

Witnesses described seeing a silver Renault Clio veering into a crowd of people on the pavement near Berlin's busy Kurfürstendamm shopping avenue, before driving back on to the road and smashing through a shop window at around 10:30 local time (08:30 GMT) on Wednesday.

A witness who would only be named as F Kacan said the driver had abandoned the car and started to run away but "we were able to stop him", AFP news agency reports.

The man was not known to the security services but had been stopped by police for property offences, Bild reported.

The incident happened opposite Breitscheidplatz, where 12 people were killed in a terrorist attack in 2016 when a truck was deliberately driven into a crowd of people at a Christmas market.

On Wednesday the mayor said it was too early to know if the area had been chosen deliberately, but she said: "It's a situation where you think, for God's sake, not again!"

After the Christmas market attack in 2016, concrete barriers were erected near the site to prevent future attacks, but Ms Giffey admitted that it is impossible to provide such protections for "all of the city".