More than two dozen people, including children, were injured when a car crashed into a union demonstration in Munich on Thursday, and the driver, a 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker who was known to the police, was taken into custody, the authorities said.
The authorities believe the crash was a deliberate attack, said Markus Söder, the governor of Bavaria, the state of which Munich is the capital.
The involvement of an Afghan man in the crash is likely to have repercussions for the country’s general election, which is 10 days away. and in which immigration has emerged as a major focal point.
The far-right Alternative for Germany party, frequently referred to as the AfD, has made controlling migration its top campaign issue.
The party has been surging in the polls, with more than 20 percent of Germans saying they will vote for it, and the conservative Christian Democrats, who are trying to retain their lead, have recently increased calls for stricter controls at borders and more deportations.
The crash happened at 10:30 Thursday morning, according to the police, when the car passed a police cruiser that was accompanying the demonstration and plowed into the crowd. The police fired one shot while arresting the man.
Memories are still fresh of a car ramming attack in December, when a man, originally from Saudi Arabia, drove into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, in central Germany, injuring as many as 300 people and killing six.
Photographs and videos of the crash site on Thursday showed a severely dented beige Mini Cooper, which witnesses said had been driven into the crowd.
A rescue helicopter and several ambulances were on site to bring victims — at least 28 were injured, two of them severely — to the hospital.
The crash site was less than a mile from the venue of the Munich Security Conference, which opens tomorrow and attracts high-profile participants and journalists from around the world. The police do not think the crash was connected to the conference.
Sandra Demmelhuber, a journalist for Bayerischer Rundfunk, the Bavarian public broadcaster, was at the crash site and described a chaotic scene.
“There is a person lying on the street and a young man was led away by the police. People sitting, crying and shaking on the ground,” she wrote on X.
The demonstration had been organized by Verdi, one of Germany’s largest unions, which had called a one-day strike for city workers.
The police have set up a command center in a nearby restaurant and have asked witnesses to come forward.
The police confirmed that the man they apprehended was known for being involved in minor crimes, such as shoplifting and drugs. Beyond those details, however, he was not publicly identified.
The crash comes on the heels of another high-profile case involving an Afghan asylum seeker, who killed a toddler and a man in a knife attack in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg last month.
Migration has been a consistently prominent issue in German politics, and the timing of that attack, coming so close to the general election, gave it added resonance.
After Thursday’s crash, Mr. Söder — whose Christian Social Union, a regional sister party of the Christian Democrats, has governed Bavaria for decades — wasted no time calling for action.
“It was not the first such act,” Mr. Söder said at the site of the crash. “Today I feel compassion for the people, but at the same time I am determined that something must change in Germany and quickly,” he added.