The street in front of the Deutsche Bank is closed, and the blue light cannot be overlooked from a distance.

A white, badly dented Mercedes AMG stands on the street: the car involved in the accident.

The car with three occupants attracted attention shortly before, on Tuesday evening around 9:30 a.m., on a civil patrol on Reuterweg, which leads from the Alte Oper to the Westend campus of Frankfurt's Goethe University.

The vehicle is traveling “significantly too fast”.

The policemen want to check the driver, but the man turns abruptly on the street and drives at breakneck speed in the direction of the Alte Oper.

Alexander Juergs

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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An accident then occurs at the height of the twin towers of Deutsche Bank.

The Mercedes driver, who ran over a red light, rammed his car into a Smart.

The sixty-seven-year-old smart driver is just about to turn from Taunusanlage into Guiollettstrasse when the vehicle hits him.

After the Mercedes had come to a standstill, the three men escaped from the scene of the accident on foot.

The injured driver of the Smart is cared for by rescue workers at the scene of the accident and then taken to a hospital.

Stolen vehicle

The injured man's vehicle suffered property damage of around 10,000 euros, while the damage to the Mercedes is estimated at around 20,000 euros. The police have not yet been able to clarify who owns the car involved in the accident. Because when the officials checked the license plates of the car, they found that they had been stolen the day before in Neuss, North Rhine-Westphalia. The suspicion that the men who fled from the scene of the accident did not want to evade a police check simply because they raced through Frankfurt's inner city at excessive speed, is therefore obvious.

On Wednesday morning, the police went public with descriptions of the men and asked for clues.

The appearance of the men was described as southern European.

All three have black hair and wore sportswear, two of them shoulder bags.

So far, however, the police have not received any information that could help track down the men.

Long list of comparable accidents

Severe, sometimes fatal accidents caused by drivers who drive significantly too fast have been a concern for people in the region for years. The list of serious accidents is long, and not a few of the events are attributed to supporters of the auto poser scene. Less than a month ago there was a serious collision in the Frankfurt district of Griesheim, on Mainzer Landstrasse. A twenty-two-year-old who was driving a bolide with more than 600 hp rammed another driver. His car was thrown into a tram stop and hit a pedestrian who was seriously injured. After the accident, the police assumed that the men drove an illegal car race.

An accident that occurred in Sachsenhausen in February claimed two lives. A 38-year-old man raced through a red light in a black Peugeot and caught two men who, as it soon turned out, were working in the popular Maincafé on the Sachsenhausen Mainufer. They died in the hospital as a result of the accident, and the driver was admitted to a psychiatric ward shortly after the crime.

An accident in October 2020 on Autobahn 66 near Hofheim also made headlines for many. A 71-year-old woman was killed and burned in her car. At that time, too, it was assumed that the cause of the fatal accident was a car race, and the public prosecutor's office accused three of those involved of murder. This allegation was later withdrawn because a video showed that another vehicle was involved in the collision.

In addition to these particularly dramatic incidents, many are currently observing "brutalization" in road traffic.

Young men who accelerate their cars rapidly on narrow, confusing streets in residential areas in order to brake abruptly at the next intersection, nightly meetings of car posers, for example in the parking lot on Offenbacher Mainufer, during which daring maneuvers with loud engines and screeching tires become: Cars and their drivers are increasingly perceived as serious dangers.

The police are opposing this with special units such as the Autoposer, Raser and Tuner control unit in Frankfurt or the Tuner, Raser and Poser working group of the Southeast Hesse police headquarters.

As the multitude of cases shows, she has not yet mastered the situation.