A 73-year-old German man died in hospital after being seriously injured when a man drove into a crowd outside a bakery in the southwestern town of Heidelberg today, police and prosecutors said in a joint statement.
Police said two other people who were injured - a 32-year-old Austrian man and a 29-year-old woman from Bosnia and Herzegovina - received hospital treatment but were later discharged.
In a statement, police said the suspect was seen getting out of the vehicle with a knife and was later tracked down to a swimming pool with the help of eye witnesses.
He is now in a hospital in Heidelberg after he was shot by police while being arrested.
He is seriously injured, police said. Regional newspaper Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung said he was not fit to be questioned.
"There are no indications of a terrorist background," police spokesman David Faulhaber said, adding that he could not comment on the possible motives for the attack.
Investigations by the public prosecutors' office in Heidelberg and the town's criminal police are under way.
Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung cited police as saying the suspect was a young German man. The newspaper said the suspect had stopped at a red traffic light and when it turned green put his foot down before hitting the group of people at high speed and smashing into a pillar.
The German authorities are on high alert after a failed Tunisian asylum-seeker drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin on 19 December killing 12 people.
