A man drove a car into pedestrians in a popular Berlin shopping district on Wednesday, killing at at least one person and injuring at least eight others, rescue services said.

The man drove into people on a street corner at around 10:30 a.m. before getting the car back on the road and then crashing into a shop window around a block further on, police spokesman Thilo Cablitz said.

Five people sustained life-threatening injuries and another three were seriously injured, fire service spokesman Adrian Wenzel told n-tv television. Police said more than a dozen people were injured.

The driver was apparently detained by passers-by before being arrested swiftly by a police officer who was near the scene, Cablitz said.

“A man is believed to have driven into a group of people. It is not yet known whether it was an accident or a deliberate act,” Berlin police said on Twitter, adding that the driver was being held at the scene.

Police said that the driver, a 29-year-old German-Armenian national, is being questioned.

Large numbers of rescue vehicles and first responders were at the scene.

Berlin Mayor Franziska Giffey tweeted that she was “deeply shocked by this incident.”

The incident happened at one end of the Kurfuerstendamm shopping boulevard and next to the Breitscheidplatz square, where an extremist carried out a vehicle attack on a Christmas market in 2016, resulting in 13 deaths.

In a 2019 incident in central Berlin, an SUV plowed into a group of pedestrians, killing four people. The driver had suffered an epileptic seizure and veered onto the sidewalk.

(AP)