“The car just mowed down everyone”: a car hit pedestrians in Melbourne

A man who ran into a crowd of pedestrians in Melbourne is a mentally disturbed drug addict, police said. The police do not have any information about his connections with terrorist organizations, reports Air force.

The accident happened at 4:45 pm on Thursday - a car crashed into a crowd of pedestrians in the center of Melbourne. 14 people were seriously injured, several of them in critical condition. Two people were arrested, including the driver who committed the hit-and-run.

The arrested driver is a 32-year-old Australian citizen of Afghan origin. When detained at the scene, he resisted the police.

Earlier, police said that hitting pedestrians was deliberate.

“At the moment we believe that this was a deliberate hit-and-run. However, we do not know the motive and the investigation is at an early stage,” Melbourne Police Chief Russell Barrett said hours after the incident.

Media conference with Russell Barrett. pic.twitter.com/j7zx0V5fYQ

- Victoria Police (@VictoriaPolice) December 21, 2017

“I didn’t even try to slow down.”

The photographs from the scene show a large white SUV and people lying around it.

According to local press reports, the white SUV crashed into a crowd at a speed of about 70 km / h at a busy intersection where more than 50 people were at that moment.

According to one of the eyewitnesses, the car knocked everyone in its path, the driver did not even try to slow down.

According to the channel Sky News Australia, among the victims is a preschool child. He suffered a head wound and was taken to hospital.

One woman told local radio station 3AW she heard screams and saw "people flying everywhere".

“We heard this noise... we saw this white car, it was just mowing down everyone,” she said.

Australia's Opposition Leader Bill Shorten tweeted about the "shocking scenes" at the scene and praised the work of emergency services.

Reportedly, the incident resembles the terrorist attacks committed earlier in the United States and some European cities. However, immediately after the driver was detained, the police stressed that the investigation into the incident was at an early stage and it was premature to draw conclusions about the motives of the detainee, despite the fact that the hitting looks like a deliberate one.

In February, 6 people died in Melbourne as a result of a car hitting a pedestrian in the city center. Then the police did not consider the incident a terrorist act.

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