Driver arrested in Germany after car drives into carnival crowds

Ten people have been injured after a car ploughed into a carnival parade in the western German town of Volkmarsen, police said.

Police said the driver had been arrested but they declined to say whether the incident was an accident or a deliberate attack.

The German news website HNA cited witnesses as saying the driver appeared to have deliberately targeted children and had driven into the crowd “at full throttle”.

The incident came less than a week after a man shot dead 11 people, including himself, in one of the worst racist attacks in Germany since the second world war.

Police vehicles and ambulances were at the scene in Volkmarsen, a small town in northern Hesse, 263 miles (423km) west of Berlin.

Dirk Richter, a police spokesman in the nearby city of Kassel, told Welt TV: “Everything we have available from the Kassel area is there.”

Carnival is hugely popular in parts of western Germany, especially in Rhineland cities such as Cologne and Düsseldorf, where festivities peak on Rose Monday, with tens of thousands of people attending street parades featuring comical or satirical floats.

Photograph: Elmar Schulten/AFP via Getty Images

Amateur pictures published online showing police officers standing next to a silver Mercedes-Benz that appeared to have been involved in the incident.

The driver deliberately broke through plastic barriers set up by police around the parade area, according to media reports.