The incident on Thursday morning shut down the centre of Austalia's second-largest city.

JOHANNESBURG – A South African couple in Australia has described scenes of panic as a car struck pedestrians outside Melbourne’s iconic Flinders Street Station.

The incident on Thursday morning shut down the centre of the country's second-largest city.

At least 13 people have been taken to hospital. Two others are being treated at the scene.

Victoria police say they've arrested the driver of the vehicle.

Witnesses told Eyewitness News how they narrowly missed a car crashing into pedestrians.

Brent Lindeque described the scene.

“Just around the corner from us at the opening of the station, there was a huge commotion and people started screaming. It must have been 20m away from us. It was just really chaotic, scary and confusing. The police arrived within a few minutes.”

There are no reports of South Africans being injured.

Melbourne police said the motive for the incident was not known but it had chilling echoes of several attacks by Islamist militants in various parts of the world over the past two years.

In January, four people were killed and more than 20 injured when a man deliberately drove into pedestrians at a spot just a few hundred metres away from the Thursday incident, though that incident was not terrorism-related.

A witness told the Australian Broadcasting Corp the vehicle was travelling at 80 to 100km/h.

“There was no breaking or any slowing down at all,” said Jim Stoupas, who said he was standing outside his doughnut shop when the car crashed into the people, one after another.

“All you could hear was just ‘bang bang bang bang bang’,” he said.

Police said they had arrested two men but that they had not been charged.

(Edited by Shimoney Regter)