BERLIN — A van slammed into people gathered for Berlin’s famed LGBTQ+ event on Saturday, killing one person, injuring at least 15 others and prompting police to call off the celebrations and a concert in the German capital hours after they had begun.
Police said some of the victims had life-threatening injuries. Firefighters, ambulances and event emergency staffers were attending to the victims.
In a post on X, police called on everyone to leave the site of the event immediately.
According to police, a white van had driven into the Tiergarten park, which is next to the route that the pride march had passed along earlier, and hit several people before colliding with a tree. Police could not say how many officers had been deployed to the scene but that it was “definitely a lot of police.”
“We are conducting an intensive search for possible suspects,” police officer Florian Nath said on a short video released on the Berlin police account on X.
Police spokesperson Alexander Klute told The Associated Press later that “at this point, we don’t 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 come to Berlin on Saturday to celebrate at Berlin’s pride parade, known in Germany as Christopher Street Day. It’s one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ celebrations.
The pride event in front of the city’s iconic Brandenburg Gate in the downtown, near Tiergarten, was called off around 10:15 p.m. and a band’s performance on stage was interrupted. People were urged to go home and to avoid taking the route 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.
