The man who drove a car into a crowd in Munich, Germany, has been revealed to be an Afghan asylum seeker with multiple prior arrests.

AP — A driver drove a car into a labor union demonstration in central Munich on Thursday, injuring at least 28 people including children, authorities said. Officials said it was believed to be an attack.

The suspect, an Afghan asylum-seeker, was arrested. The incident follows a series of attacks involving immigrants in recent months that have pushed migration to the forefront of the campaign for Germany’s Feb. 23 election.

Participants in a demonstration by the service workers’ union ver.di were walking along a street at about 10:30 a.m. when the car overtook a police vehicle following the gathering, accelerated and plowed into the back of the group, police said.

Officers arrested the suspect after firing a shot at the car, deputy police chief Christian Huber said. He added that at least 28 people were believed to be injured, some of them seriously. A damaged Mini was seen at the scene, along with debris including shoes.

The suspect was a 24-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker, Huber said. Bavaria’s state interior minister, Joachim Herrmann), said the man was known to authorities in connection with theft and drug offenses, but didn’t give further details. He said officials believe the protest was likely targeted at random.

The state’s justice minister, Georg Eisenreich, said a prosecutors’ department that investigates extremism and terror was looking into the case.

“We feel with the victims, we are praying for the victims — we hope very much that they all make it,” Bavarian governor Markus Söder told reporters at the scene.

“It is suspected to be an attack — a lot points to that,” Söder added.

Mayor Dieter Reiter said that children were among those injured.

A string of recent attacks

The Munich incident comes three weeks after a two-year-old boy and a man were killed in a knife attack in Aschaffenburg, also in Bavaria. An Afghan whose asylum application was rejected was the suspect in that attack, which propelled migration to the center of the German election campaign.

The Aschaffenburg attack followed knife attacks in Mannheim and Solingen last year in which the suspects were immigrants from Afghanistan and Syria, respectively — in the latter case, also a rejected asylum-seeker who was supposed to have left the country.

In the December Christmas market car ramming in Magdeburg, the suspect was a Saudi doctor who previously had come to various regional authorities’ attention.