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A car ploughed into a group of people in the city of Mannheim on Monday, police said, killing at least two people and injuring 11 more.
Authorities said a 40-year-old German man had been arrested after the incident, which sparked a huge operation in the city in the south-western state of Baden-Württemberg.
They said the man had shot himself in the mouth after the attack and was in hospital in a stable condition receiving treatment for his injuries.
Police and prosecutors said they did not believe there was a political or extremist motive behind the attack, which they said appeared to have been deliberate. But they added that the suspect had a 2018 conviction for rightwing hate speech in connection with a social media post.
They said the alleged perpetrator, who was from the nearby state of Rhineland-Palatinate and had previous convictions for assault and drink-driving, was being treated for psychological problems. He also previously served a short prison sentence for assault.
Pressed on why they were confident in ruling out an extremist motive, given the suspect’s 2018 Facebook post, investigators said their inquiries had “not yet led in that direction” although they were exploring all options.
Police had previously said they would be on high nationwide alert for this year’s carnival season, which began last week and is a key event in parts of Germany in the run-up to the Christian festival of Lent.
They warned that social media accounts connected to the Isis jihadi group had called for attacks on parades in Cologne and Nuremberg. Mannheim’s celebration took place on Sunday.
Interior minister Nancy Faeser cancelled her participation in the Cologne parade after news emerged of the Mannheim incident.
“Rescuing lives, caring for the injured and the initial investigations by the authorities in Mannheim are now the priority,” said a ministry spokesperson.
Germany has suffered a series of fatal assaults in recent months, including a car ramming in Munich in February and a similar incident in Magdeburg in December. There have also been several stabbing incidents, including one in Mannheim, which has a population of 315,000, in May 2024.
Those attacks were all committed by refugees or asylum seekers, prompting a bitter national debate about migration policy in the lead-up to last month’s federal elections.
Germany has also been hit in the past by rightwing extremist attacks, including a mass shooting targeting people with immigrant roots in the western city of Hanau in 2020 that killed nine people.
In 2019 a white supremacist tried to stage a massacre of Jewish worshippers in a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle.
