By Kirsti Knolle, Michele Sani and Martin Schlicht
BERLIN, July 25 (Reuters) – One person has been killed and 15 injured, with some in life-threatening condition, after a vehicle mowed down a crowd near Berlin’s Pride celebrations on Saturday evening, the city’s police said.
Emergency services responded to an incident in the city’s central Tiergarten park close to the Brandenburg Gate, where police said the white vehicle struck multiple people.
“According to our latest information, the vehicle drove … into the Tiergarten around 10 p.m. (2000 GMT), injuring several people in the process, and then came to a standstill after hitting a tree here in the Tiergarten,” a police spokesperson at the scene said.
“It was empty, which is why we are currently working intensively to track down the perpetrator or perpetrators.”
The police did not describe the vehicle beyond saying that it was white. Tabloid newspaper Bild cited a witness as saying it was a van and that a man got out of it and fled on foot.
Hundreds of thousands of people had gathered peacefully in the German capital for the annual Christopher Street Day celebrations, one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ events, before the apparent attack brought it to an abrupt end.
A large number of emergency service vehicles were at the scene.
Christopher Street Day draws hundreds of thousands of people to the German capital each year. The event commemorates the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York and combines a parade with political demands for equality, inclusion and protection against discrimination.
First held in West Berlin in 1979, the CSD has grown from a small demonstration into a major fixture of the city’s cultural and political calendar. The parade is the centrepiece of the CSD, but it is accompanied by a wide range of political, cultural and party events held across the city.
(Reporting by Kirsti Knolle, Michele Sani and Martin Schlicht in Berlin and Sabine Wollrab in FrankfurtWriting by Francois MurphyEditing by Rod Nickel, Matthew Lewis and David Gregorio)
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