One person was killed and several others injured when a man drove a car into a lunch-hour crowd in the southwestern German city of Mannheim, the police said on Monday.

The police said that the driver had been arrested, adding that they were investigating whether other perpetrators had been involved.

The authorities asked people to avoid the city center on Monday.

There have been several recent attacks with vehicles in Germany. Two weeks ago, a 24-year-old Afghan man who was seeking asylum purposefully drove into a union demonstration in Munich, killing a 2-year-old and her mother and wounding several dozen others.

And in December, a Saudi doctor who had been living in Germany for more than a decade is suspected of having driven his car into a Christmas market in the central city of Magdeburg, killing six people and injuring hundreds of others.

Mannheim, which has a population of about 320,000, was in the headlines last year when an Afghan citizen living in Germany stabbed people at a far-right demonstration, killing a police officer who had rushed in to stop the attack.