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)