The 29-year-old driver has not yet provided any information about the crime and is in a psychiatric hospital at the request of the prosecutor. This assumes that the man’s mental illness led to the death drive, in which a woman was killed and more than 30 people were injured.
The man had previously had several psychological problems. The social psychiatric service in the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district has had to intervene several times since 2014, said district councilor for youth and health, Detlef Wagner (CDU), on Friday. The last time this was in early 2020. Wagner did not name a specific number of operations with reference to medical confidentiality.
According to RBB information, the German-Armenian was transferred to a psychiatric clinic in 2020, where admission should be examined. What happened then is not known. “We are always the first to intervene,” Wagner explained. “After that we’re out.” This is also the case with the 29-year-old, said the district councilor. There will be no further entries after the beginning of 2020. “The man – at least according to our files – no longer appeared with mental problems,” says Wagner.
The public prosecutor accuses the 29-year-old of murder in one case and attempted murder in 17 cases. He drove in two groups of people on Ku’damm and Tauentzienstrasse on Wednesday. A school class from Bad Arolsen in northern Hesse, which was a guest in the capital, was particularly affected. The teacher died, a teacher and seven students were taken to hospital with serious injuries, and 17 other people were injured.
There are indications that the arrested man is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, said the spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office, Sebastian Büchner, on Thursday. Drugs were found during a search of the 29-year-old’s apartment. The accused had released his doctors from the duty of confidentiality.
There is still no evidence of a terrorist background to the current act – according to the public prosecutor’s office, an accident can also currently be ruled out. The federal and state government classified the incident as an amoktat. The public prosecutor’s office and the police, on the other hand, deliberately did not use the term “amoktat” at first.
The 29-year-old suspect of Armenian origin was naturalized in 2015, explained Berlin’s Interior Senator Iris Spranger (SPD) on Thursday. He was often noticed by the police, there had been investigations into bodily harm, trespassing and insults. The crime scene is not far from the Memorial Church on Breitscheidplatz in Berlin-Charlottenburg. In December 2016, an Islamist assassin drove into a Christmas market there.
Source: Nachrichten
