BERLIN — A van drove into a crowd near Berlin’s high-profile LGBTQ+ celebration on Saturday, killing one person and injuring at least 15 others, authorities said. The incident led police to shut down the festivities and cancel a concert in the German capital just hours after the event had started.
Police said several of those hurt suffered life-threatening injuries. Firefighters, ambulance crews and emergency teams assigned to the event rushed to treat victims at the scene.
In a message posted on X, Berlin police urged everyone in the area to leave the event site immediately.
Authorities said a white van entered Tiergarten park, located beside the route used earlier by the pride march, and struck multiple people before crashing into a tree. Police did not provide an exact number of officers sent to the scene, saying only that “definitely a lot of police” had been deployed.
“We are conducting an intensive search for possible suspects,” police officer Florian Nath said in a brief video shared on the Berlin police account on X.
Police spokesperson Alexander Klute later told The Associated Press that investigators did not yet know “anything about any possible motives, the identity of the perpetrator or the perpetrators, or anything of that nature.”
Hundreds of thousands of people had gathered in Berlin on Saturday for the city’s pride parade, known in Germany as Christopher Street Day, one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ events.
The celebration near the Brandenburg Gate, close to Tiergarten in central Berlin, was halted at about 10:15 p.m., and a band performing onstage was cut off. Attendees were told to head home and avoid walking through the park.
Before the incident, people had celebrated peacefully, marching through the city for hours, dancing to loud music, and cheering the around 80 floats that participated in the parade.
Julian Miethig, who had attended the LGBTQ+ party at the Brandenburg Gate earlier, said he had just wanted to go to an afterparty when he heard from a friend that “something bad happened there and there are a lot of fire trucks, a lot of emergency vehicles, ambulances.”
He said he went to Tiergarten and was shocked that something like this could have happened at Berlin’s pride celebrations.
“It’s a dark day for the community,” he said.
