A teacher was killed and nine other people were seriously injured when a man drove a car into a German school group standing in a popular Berlin shopping district, authorities have said.

The man drove into people on a street corner at around 10.30am before getting the car back on the road and then crashing into a shop window a short distance away, police spokesman Thilo Cablitz said.

Berlin’s top security official, Iris Spranger, said the woman killed was a teacher on a school trip with students from the central German state of Hesse.

Five people sustained life-threatening injuries and another three were seriously injured, fire service spokesman Adrian Wentzel told n-tv television. Police said more than a dozen people had been injured.

The driver was apparently detained by passers-by before being arrested by a police officer who was near the scene, Mr Cablitz said. He added that officers were trying to determine whether he had deliberately driven into pedestrians or whether it was an accident, possibly caused by a medical emergency.

Police later tweeted that the driver was a 29-year-old German-Armenian who lived in Berlin.

A car crashed into a shop after hitting a crowd of people in central Berlin
The incident happened at one end of the Kurfuerstendamm shopping boulevard (Michael Sohn/AP)

Ms Spranger said posters were found in the man’s car “in which he expressed views about Turkey”.

Large numbers of rescue vehicles and first responders were at the scene.

Berlin mayor Franziska Giffey tweeted that she was “deeply shocked by this incident” and said that authorities were keeping an open mind about possible motives.

The site of the incident in Berlin
Police are trying to determine whether the man deliberately drove into pedestrians (Michael Sohn/AP)

Meanwhile, American-British actor John Barrowman, who was in a nearby shop with his partner at the time of the crash, described the scene as “carnage”.

The incident happened at one end of the Kurfuerstendamm shopping boulevard and next to the Breitscheidplatz square, where an extremist carried out a vehicle attack on a Christmas market in 2016, resulting in 13 deaths.

In a 2019 incident in central Berlin, an SUV ploughed into a group of pedestrians in central Berlin, killing four people. The driver had suffered an epileptic seizure and veered onto the pavement.