Munich car ramming injures at least 28 people, say police

The incident happened a day before world leaders including Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky and US Vice President JD Vance were due to arrive at the Munich security conference about 1.5km (1 mile) away.

Police appealed for witnesses to come forward with information and footage of the incident.

Bavaria was hit by an attack only three weeks ago, when a toddler and a man aged 41 were killed in a stabbing at a park in the town of Aschaffenburg.

It soon emerged that the suspected attacker was an Afghan national with suspected jihadist sympathies, and Olaf Scholz had called on authorities at the time to explain why he was still in Germany.

Repeated attacks have propelled the issue of immigration and asylum policy to the forefront of Germany's 23 February election, with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) running second in the opinion polls.

The party's candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, has publicly backed calls for "remigration", seen as referring to mass deportations of immigrants.

Scholz, whose centre left Social Democrats are trailing behind the AfD, said the government was planning to increase deportations of serious criminals to Afghanistan. Deportations to Kabul began last August.

In a separate development, an Afghan man with suspected Islamist sympathies went on trial at a high-security prison in Stuttgart over a knife attack that killed a policeman and wounded five other people at an anti-Islam rally in Mannheim in May last year.

Months later, three people were murdered by a man armed with a knife in the western city of Solingen. A Syrian who was due to be deported was arrested, and jihadist group Islamic State said it was behind the attack.