One person was killed and several others injured when a man drove a car into a lunch-hour crowd in the southwestern German city of Mannheim, the police said on Monday.

The police said that the driver had been arrested, adding that they were investigating whether other perpetrators had been involved.

The authorities asked people to avoid the city centre on Monday.

There have been several recent attacks with vehicles in Germany. Two weeks ago, a 24-year-old Afghan man who was seeking asylum purposefully drove into a union demonstration in Munich, killing a 2-year-old and her mother and wounding several dozen others.

And in December, a Saudi doctor who had been living in Germany for more than a decade is suspected of having driven his car into a Christmas market in the central city of Magdeburg, killing six people and injuring hundreds of others.

Mannheim, which has a population of about 320,000, was in the headlines last year when an Afghan citizen living in Germany stabbed people at a far-Right demonstration, killing a police officer who had rushed in to stop the attack.

The police would not immediately characterise the incident as an attack. Police spokesperson Stefan Wilhelm said a driver drove into people on Paradeplatz, a pedestrianised street downtown, around noon, when workers come for lunch breaks. Local media reported a carnival market was taking place, meaning more visitors than usual in Mannheim, with a population of 326,000.

Mannheim University Hospital said they were treating three people from the crash, two adults and a child, German news agency DPA reported. It was not immediately clear whether other hospitals received patients.

Images from the scene showed parts of the downtown area cordoned off, with a heavy police presence and helicopters above. The police gathered round a badly damaged black car as ambulances lined up outside the cordon.

Fiscal sea change

The prospect of a military spending boom by Germany, unprecedented since the Cold War, sent Europe's defence stocks soaring after Reuters reported the likely next government was mulling a fiscal sea change for Europe's biggest economy.

Germany's likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, did not confirm that his conservatives and the Social Democrats were mulling setting up special funds worth nearly a trillion euros to finance urgent defence and infrastructure spending.

But he said spending decisions had to be taken "with great urgency" after US President Donald Trump and his deputy harangued Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on Friday, crystalising European fears that Washington had cooled on back-stopping Europe's defence.

"We must now show that we are in a position to act independently in Europe," he said. "The question of defence has priority."

New York Times News Service, AP, Reuters