Mother and her two-year-old daughter die after car ramming attack by Afghan asylum seeker in Munich that left 39 injured
A 37-year-old mother and her two-year-old daughter have died from injuries they sustained when an Afghan national rammed a car into a crowd in a horrific attack in Munich on Thursday.
Prosecutors had said on Friday that at least 39 people were injured, some of them critically, when the car ploughed into trade union activists demonstrating for higher pay.
The mother and child were among those taken to hospital with serious injuries after the attack and are the first fatalities.
Authorities said they were treating the incident as a religiously motivated attack.
The car-ramming has brought security issues back into focus in campaigning for Germany‘s federal election on February 23.
The attack also came hours before the arrival of international leaders in the southern German city for the annual Munich Security Conference.
Footage from the scene captured the moment the driver was arrested, as cops swarmed the vehicle and pinned him to the ground.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in a message on X that he was ‘deeply shocked and saddened by the death of the small child and the woman who succumbed to their injuries after the attack in Munich’.
‘It is unimaginable what the relatives are going through. My deepest condolences go out to them. The country mourns with them.’
Farhad N., the 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker, was due to appear before a judge yesterday afternoon, a day after he drove the Mini Cooper into a crowd of striking unionists.
Gabriele Tilmann, the senior public prosecutor, said that Farhad had confessed during an interrogation to deliberately driving into the demonstration.
Police said that Farhad had an ‘Islamist orientation’ but was not affiliated with any Islamist groups.
The prosecutor said that he had prayed after driving his car into the crowd and uttered the words ‘Allahu Akbar’ to police officers.
A two-year-old child was left fighting for their life when the car hit a mother pushing a pram, local media reports.
‘The suspect came to Germany in 2016 as an unaccompanied minor and was here legally,’ Tilmann said this morning. He was said to have lived in a rented apartment in Munich while working as a store detective. Farhad was born in Kabul in 2001, Bild reports.
Police are still working to uncover a motive for the attack on the Verdi labour union demonstration. Initial findings have not uncovered any evidence the suspect collaborated with anybody else.
‘We will continue to investigate the perpetrator’s personality,’ Tilmann said, noting that Farhad would be questioned further following the initial two-hour interrogation. Bavarian police will also be sifting through the Farhad’s phone communications.
Early analysis indicates he had pre-planned the attack; police uncovered in one chat with a relative that he had said: ‘Tomorrow I won’t be here anymore.’
According to German newspaper Spiegel, he is said to have uploaded Islamist posts online before the crime.
Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said Farhad’s asylum application had been rejected in 2016, when he arrived in Germany.
However, he reportedly received a so-called toleration permit from the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, which meant that his deportation was suspended until 2023, when he got a residence and work permit until April 2025.
It is understood that Farhad worked for a security service and participated in bodybuilding competitions in his free time. He regularly shared pictures of his fitness journey with his more than 100,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok.
Following the tragic incident, Chancellor Scholz said: ‘This perpetrator cannot hope for any leniency. He must be punished and he must leave the country.’
He added: ‘If this was an attack, we must take consistent action against possible perpetrators using all legal means at our disposal.’
The attack comes at a sensitive time ahead of the upcoming German election on February 23.
Recent attacks on German soil have made security and immigration key issues going into the contest.
Moderates have been pressed to take a harder line on immigration amid a relative resurgence of the far-right AfD party.
Only a day before, Chancellor Scholz said that Germany would extend its strict border controls brought in to tackle migration and Islamist terrorism by a further six months past their planned expiry next month.
He cited their success, claiming border checks had resulted in ‘47,000 people being turned back at the border’ to date.
He also cited figures showing asylum applications had fallen by a third last year from 2023 and that 1,900 people smugglers had been arrested.
The government announced a sweeping crackdown on traffic into the country in September to deal with what Interior Minister Nancy Faeser called the ‘continuing burden’ of migration and ‘Islamist terrorism’.
In December, the country was shaken by an attack in Bavaria, when an Afghan asylum seeker allegedly stabbed a two-year-old boy and a passerby to death in a German park.
Enamullah O., 28, was arrested near the scene, suspected of attacking a group of children in a park in Aschaffenburg. Two people were killed and three injured, police said.
Also in December, a Saudi doctor drove a car through a German Christmas market, injuring hundreds and killing at least six.
Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, a 50-year-old who arrived in the country in 2006 and held permanent residency, rammed his SUV into a packed market in the town of Magdeburg on December 20.
Social media accounts falsely alleged al-Abdulmohsen was an Islamist terrorist shortly after the attack. The German interior minister later identified the suspect as being Islamophobic himself.
Germany brought in its harsh border policy in September in the aftermath of an attack in Solingen on August 23, in which three people were killed and eight were injured.
Following the attack, police announced they had arrested a 26-year-old Syrian refugee as a suspect.
