Police in Germany said that a man drove his car into carnival crowds in western city of Volkmarsen, injuring dozen people.
The driver had been arrested, but the police declined to say whether the incident was an accident or a deliberate attack.
Local sources quoted witnesses as saying the driver appeared to have deliberately targeted children and had driven into the crowd “at full throttle”.
German media said the driver deliberately broke through plastic barriers set up by police around the parade area.
The incident came less than a week after a man shot dead 11 people, including himself, in one of the worst racist attacks in Germany since the second world war.
Police vehicles and ambulances rushed to the scene in Volkmarsen, a small town in northern Hesse, 263 miles (423km) west of Berlin.
Dirk Richter, a police spokesman in the nearby city of Kassel, told Welt TV: “Everything we have available from the Kassel area is there.”
According to Guardian, carnival is hugely popular in parts of western Germany, especially in Rhineland cities such as Cologne and Düsseldorf, where festivities peak on “Rose Monday” with tens of thousands of people attending street parades featuring comical or satirical floats.
Amateur pictures published online showed police officers standing next to a silver Mercedes-Benz car that appeared to have been involved in the incident.
Last week, a gunman killed nine people in two apparently racially motivated shootings at shisha bars in the German town of Hanau, before the suspect killed himself but also his mother at his home.
Investigators believed a racist motive was behind the attack.
Chancellor Angela Merkel said the circumstances of the attack needed to be fully investigated, and the shootings had exposed the “poison” of racism in German society. She pledged to stand up against those who sought to pide the country.
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