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A van packed with migrants crashed at a highway junction in southern Germany on Friday after the driver accelerated to avoid a police check, killing seven people and injuring 16, authorities said.
A police patrol noticed the overloaded vehicle on the A94 highway east of Munich at about 3:15 a.m. and tried to stop it, police said. The driver didn’t react and accelerated to 180 kph (112 mph). Shortly afterward, he lost control of the vehicle when he took a turning off the highway and the van overturned, hurling several of the 23 people on board out of the vehicle.
Seven people were killed, including a 6-year-old child, police said in a statement. The other 16 were injured, some of them seriously, and were taken to hospitals. The people on board were Syrian and Turkish citizens.
The driver and suspected smuggler, a 24-year-old stateless man resident in Austria, was among the injured. Police said he was formally detained at a hospital and is under investigation on suspicion of homicide among other offenses.