Worthy Christian News > World News > Dozens Injured As ‘Islamic Extremist’ Drives Car In German Crowd (Worthy News Focus)

Dozens Injured As ‘Islamic Extremist’ Drives Car In German Crowd (Worthy News Focus)

By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News

MUNICH, GERMANY (Worthy News) – Investigators say an Afghan migrant who pushed his car into a workers protest in the German city of Munich, injuring nearly 40 people, was a bodybuilding “Islamic extremist” shouting “Allahu Akbar” or “Allah is the Greatest.”

At least 36 people — including a mother and her 2-year-old child — were reportedly injured. Additionally, a 12-year-old child who was severely injured was still in intensive care, officials explained.

Farhad Noori, a 24-year-old who had just been turned down for asylum, admitted to intentionally driving his mini-cooper car into the 1,500-strong crowd in Munich in an apparent “Islamic extremist attack,” according to German law enforcement.

Witnesses said they heard the car as it drove into the crowd on Thursday. The police reportedly fired a single shot as they went to arrest the driver.

Ambulances and a helicopter rushed to the scene, according to witnesses.

Local police then set up a temporary post in a nearby restaurant, officials said, asking witnesses to come forward.

Officers also used dogs to search the car, which was lifted onto a flatbed tow truck and impounded, Worthy News learned.

FBI INVOLVED

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is assisting German police in the investigation, according to sources familiar with the case.

Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter said he was “deeply shocked” by the apparent Islamic attack.

The violence interrupted a demonstration after Verdi, one of Germany’s biggest trade unions, called a one-day strike demanding higher wages for some public sector workers, including those employed in daycare, garbage collection, and city administration.

Police officers were accompanying the roughly 1,500 marchers as they walked down a public street where the car attack happened, witnesses said.

The alleged driver came to Germany as an unaccompanied minor in 2016, according to the authorities.

During his asylum application, he allegedly said that his father “had been murdered in Afghanistan” and that the killers were looking for him.

The authorities did not believe his testimony then or give him official asylum status.

BUREAUCRATIC TURN

In a standard bureaucratic turn, Munich gave the man a temporary residence permit in 2021, which allowed him access to education opportunities and to work.

Officials said that the man attended school and eventually started working in retail security for two private firms before he decided to drive his car into a crowd.

The came at a sensitive time as the capital of Germany’s southeastern state of Bavaria sees heavy security at the three-day Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of international foreign and security policy officials.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance was due to attend the conference to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy amid the ongoing full-scale Russian invasion of his country.

Also on Thursday, prosecutors in the eastern German city of Dresden said a suspect was being held in a foiled plot to attack a shelter for asylum seekers.

They explained that they had “received an anonymous tip-off that a 21-year-old German man from the Meissen area had armed himself with explosives to carry out an attack on a shelter for asylum seekers in Senftenberg.”

No more details were immediately available, but it comes amid mounting anger over attacks by suspected Islamic extremists among migrants.

Observers noted that Thursday’s incident comes less than two months after a man rammed a truck through a crowd at a Christmas market in the eastern city of Magdeburg, killing five people and wounding more than 200 others. The German government said the tragedy would have been hard to prevent and that the suspect appeared to be “mentally disturbed.”