Aman drove a car into pedestrians in the German city of Heidelberg on Saturday, killing one person and injuring two others, then fled on foot brandishing a knife before being intercepted and shot by police officers.
Dramatic video footage posted on Twitter showed the alleged attacker surrounded by officers with their guns drawn, who shouted orders at him and then opened fire after a tense standoff on a footpath next to a restaurant.
One of the three people hit outside a bakery in a central square of the picturesque town was seriously injured, Anne Baas, a police spokeswoman, said. Police later said the pedestrian had been killed.
Police said they did not know have any information on the motives for the attack, which comes just over two months after an asylum seeker killed 12 people when he drove a lorry into a crowd in Berlin, but said that initial findings suggested it was not terrorism-related. The suspect was identified as a 35-year-old German man.
He got out of his Hamburg-registered rental car after ploughing into the three people and was seen brandishing a black-handled knife as he made off.
Police intercepted him just five hundred yards away and ordered him to put down his weapon during a short standoff, Heidelberg24 news website reported.
The man refused to obey and it was then that an officer opened fire, it said.
Police said they could not confirm local media reports that the man was mentally disturbed. They said he appeared to have acted alone.
He is now being treated for his injuries in a hospital in Heidelberg.
On December 19 a Tunisian asylum-seeker drove a truck into crowds at a busy Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people.
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) claimed responsibility for the attack, and released a video of the attacker, Anis Amri, pledging allegiance to its leader.
Amri then went on the run across Europe and was killed a few days later in a shoot-out with Italian police in Milan.
Last July dozens of people were killed, including children, when a lorry ploughed into a large crowd watching a fireworks display in the southern French city of Nice to mark the Bastille Day national holiday.
The driver of the lorry, identified as 31-year-old Tunisian called Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, was shot dead by police.
Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung, a local newspaper, said Saturday's incident happened after a man stopped at a red traffic light and when it turned green put his foot down before hitting the group of people at high speed and smashing into a pillar.
The man who died from his injuries in hospital about two hours after the attack was a 73-year-old German citizen, police and the Heidelberg state prosecutor said in a statement.
The other two people injured were a 32-year-old Austrian man and a 29-year-old woman from Bosnia. Both were treated for minor injuries before being discharged.
The suspected attacker was undergoing surgery in a local hospital on Saturday evening.
The police statement said there were so far no indications that this was a terror attack.
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