JERUSALEM — A preliminary investigation of a Palestinian driver who crashed into a bus stop in Jerusalem late Wednesday night, killing an Israeli man and injuring an Israeli woman, reinforced suspicions that he had rammed his car into the pedestrians intentionally, the Israeli police said Thursday.

The crash was immediately considered suspect because it came after a number of vehicular attacks by Palestinian drivers in recent months, several of them along the same stretch of road leading north out of the city center, near the East Jerusalem neighborhood of French Hill.

The Israeli police chief, Yohanan Danino, also referred to the timing of the event, on the eve of Israel’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, saying he viewed it with the “utmost severity.”

But Nasser Messis, a lawyer for the driver, Khaled Koutineh, 37, a resident of the West Bank town of Anata, just beyond Jerusalem’s city limits, said that his client denied ramming into the bus stop deliberately and insisted that the crash was the result of a regular car accident in heavy rain.