A woman and her daughter have died from injuries they sustained when an Afghan asylum seeker drove a car into a crowd in Munich.
A spokesman from the German police confirmed the pair were the first fatalities from the incident.
It comes as German federal prosecutors said there were suspicions that a car ramming attack in Munich was religiously motivated and intended to undermine Germany’s democratic order.
Officers fired on the car after the attack, but the suspect was not hit. Lead prosecutor Gabriele Tilmann said the driver subsequently said the words "Allahu akbar" ("God is greatest") and prayed in the presence of police.
A view of the scene after a car plowed into a crowd in the southern German city of MunichGetty
Police secures the area after a car drove into a crowd in Munich, GermanyReuters
Members of the emergency services work at the scene where a car drove into a crowd in the southern German city of Munich GettyProsecutors 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 attack has brought security issues back into focus in campaigning for Germany's federal election on February 23. Tilmann said there was no evidence to suggest the suspect, identified as Farhad Noori, was affiliated with any Islamist or terrorist organisations.
She said there was no indication of accomplices, but that investigators were evaluating his communications - mostly in Dari, a language spoken in Afghanistan - and items obtained during searches to ascertain whether anyone had prior knowledge of the crime or was involved.
A Munich court issued an arrest warrant against the suspect and ordered him to remain in investigative custody.
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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz lays a flower next to Minister for Justice and Transport Volker Wissing, at a makeshift memorial for the victims of a suspected ramming attack
Reuters
German authorities say the Afghan national arrived in Germany as an unaccompanied minor in 2016, and that he was in Germany legally and had been working as a store detective.
Tilmann said Noori had used social media to present himself as a bodybuilder and athlete, and had posted religious content.
He did not have any prior convictions and had not been due for deportation, deputy police chief Christian Huber said, correcting police statements from the day before that were seized upon by right wing politicians
.Immigration and security issues have dominated campaigning ahead of the election, especially after other violent incidents in recent weeks, with polls show the centre-right conservatives of the CDU leading, followed by the hard right, Elon Musk backed AfD.
In December, six people were killed in an attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg and last month a toddler and adult were killed in a knife attack in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg. Immigrants have been arrested over both attacks.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Munich mayor Dieter Reiter
Reuters
Conservative Friedrich Merz, the frontrunner to be Germany's next chancellor, said security would be his top priority, while the AfD, in second place in polls, focused on the suspect's legal status in Germany.
