Berlin police probe Tom Cruise movie accident (Roundup)

Aug 20, 2007, 16:05 GMT

Actors perform during the shooting of the film \'Valkyrie\' in front of the Ministry of Finance in Berlin, Germany, 18 August 2007. Parts of the street stay blocked until 20 August because of the filming. Tom Cruise stars in the film as Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg who plotted to kill Adolf Hitler. EPA/STEPHANIE PILICK

Berlin - Eleven people were injured, one seriously, in an accident in central Berlin during the filming of Tom Cruise's new movie on the wartime resistance to Hitler's Nazi regime, police said Monday.

Police said they were investigating a potential case of injury caused by negligence. Berlin authorities were looking into whether health and safety regulations had been infringed.

The injured were extras playing German soldiers and were sitting on the back of a flatbed truck, when a wooden side flap fell open as the truck was negotiating a curve in the Mitte neighbourhood on Sunday night.

On falling off the truck, the 11 suffered bruises and head injuries. The injuries were not life-threatening, police said.

One of the injured extras told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that the production company United Artists had been alerted a week ago to defects on the truck but had failed to remedy them.

'The production firm played with our lives and our health,' said 36-year-old Alexander Klute, who suffered a bruised pelvis when he was thrown from the vehicle.

United Artists was unavailable for comment on the allegations. A spokesman said earlier that none of the extras was seriously hurt.

Cruise was not present at the time of the acident. Filming was suspended, but was resumed as planned on Monday.

The accident occurred during filming of Valkyrie, in which Cruise stars as the German nobleman, Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, a leader of the failed 1944 plot to kill Hitler.

Parts of the movie are being filmed at historical locations in Berlin's government district.

The truck that caused the accident is to be examined to determine whether a mechanical defect was the cause.

Cruise has been staying in Berlin with his wife, Katie Holmes, and their infant daughter, Suri, during the shooting of the movie in the German capital and Brandenburg, the eastern state surrounding Berlin.

Valkyrie tracks the plot against Hitler, in which Stauffenberg, a colonel, planted a bomb in a briefcase at a briefing at Wolfsschanze, or Wolf's Lair, the German military high command in Eastern Prussia.

The bomb killed four people but left Hitler only injured. Stauffenberg was arrested soon after the blast and executed early the next day.