A man who drove his taxi onto a crowded pavement, injuring eight people in Moscow earlier today, has told the police he was very tired after a 20-hour working day, and accidentally put his foot on the accelerator instead of the brake.
Some of those pedestrians injured were Mexican football fans, in Russia for the World Cup.
A handout CCTV picture released by the Moscow Municipal Traffic Regulation center shows Russian police officers and paramedics working at the scene after a taxi drove into a crowd injuring seven people. Photo: AFP
Security camera footage shows the taxi veer out of a queue of stationary traffic and accelerate into pedestrians before coming to a halt near Red Square before the driver ran away.
He was caught by passers-by.
Moscow police said the driver was a 28-year-old national of Kyrgyzstan.
The police said he had told them that he was very tired after a long day, and he didn't mean to put his foot on the accelerator.
Earlier, the city's mayor said the driver lost control of the car, while Russia's Interfax news agency quoted an unnamed source as saying he had fallen asleep at the wheel.
But one witness, who was across the road at the time of the crash, said it did not appear to be accidental.
"I have the feeling that he did it deliberately because he was in the traffic jam with the cars going really slowly," said Viktoria Geranovich.
"How could he lose control of the wheel, push the gas and drive into the crowds?"
She said "mostly girls" were knocked down, but people rushed to help and the ambulance arrived quickly.
"Thank God everything went well. It's scary that this happened in the very centre."
An unidentified official said of the injured: "Seven of them are in a satisfactory condition and one woman is in a moderate condition."
Security in Russia is very tight for the World Cup with tens of thousands of police deployed to the 11 cities hosting matches.
- BBC