A 37-year-old woman and her 2-year-old daughter died from their injuries two days after a car intentionally plowed into a crowd in Munich, German police said.
A police spokesman said the mother and daughter died Saturday afternoon. Their names have not been released.
The attack, which took place Thursday during a trade union demonstration, injured dozens of people between the ages of 2 to 60, with eight seriously hurt, police said earlier in the week.
The suspect, who drove a white vehicle into the crowd of thousands of people, was arrested on 36 counts of attempted murder, as well as grievous bodily harm and reckless driving.
Authorities said the attack is being treated as an act of Islamic extremism, though they emphasized that it is not connected to a nearby major security conference featuring world and defense leaders, including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, where the main topic of discussion has been the war in Ukraine.
The suspect, a 24-year-old Afghan national who has not been identified, said in a police interview that he purposely drove into the crowd, Gabriele Tilmann, a senior public prosecutor, said at a news conference. The suspect’s reason “could be summarized as a religious reason,” Tilmann said.
“I can’t say more about it, but what he said would lead us to conclude that it was a religious motive,” she said.
“We don’t want to jump to any conclusions, but given what has happened, we would assume this was an Islamic extremist attack,” she continued, adding that the suspect prayed after his arrest.
Tilmann said there is no evidence so far to suggest the suspect was part of any Islamist organizations or was working with any accomplices. A search of his apartment did not turn up any evidence linked to the attack, according to authorities.
Police said the suspect was an asylum seeker with legal right to remain in Germany. He lives in Munich and came to the country in 2016 as an unaccompanied minor, police said. He was known to authorities “from investigations in which he was a witness due to his previous work” as a store detective, Munich police have said. He did not have any prior convictions.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
