Germans mourned both the victims and their shattered sense of security on Saturday after a Saudi doctor deliberately drove into a Christmas market full of holiday shoppers, killing at least five people, including a small child, and wounding at least 200 others.
Authorities arrested a 50-year-old man at the crime scene in Magdeburg on Friday evening and took him into custody for questioning. He has lived in Germany since 2006 and practices as a doctor in Bernburg, about 40 kilometers south of Magdeburg. officials said.
State Governor Reiner Haseloff told reporters that the death toll had risen to five from two previously and that a total of more than 200 people had been injured.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz said almost 40 of them were “so seriously injured that we have to be very worried about them.”
Several German media outlets identified the suspect as Taleb A., although his last name was withheld for privacy reasons, and reported that he was a specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy.
Mourners lit candles and laid flowers outside a church near the market on the cold and dreary day. Several people stopped and cried. A Berlin church choir, whose members witnessed an earlier Christmas market attack in 2016, sang “Amazing Grace,” a hymn about God’s mercy, expressing their prayers and solidarity with the victims.
There were no answers Saturday as to what motivated the man to drive his black BMW into a crowd in the eastern German city.
Describing himself as a former Muslim, the suspect shared dozens of tweets and retweets daily that focused on Islamophobic themes, criticized religion, and congratulated Muslims who had given up the faith.
Get national news daily
Receive the most important news and headlines from politics, business and current affairs in your inbox once a day.
He also accused German authorities of not doing enough to combat what he called the “Islamism of Europe.” Some described him as an activist who helped Saudi women escape their homeland. He has also expressed support for the far-right and anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
Haseloff said Friday that authorities believe the man acted alone.
The violence shocked Germany and the city, bringing the mayor to the brink of tears and wiping out a festive event that is part of a centuries-old German tradition. This prompted several other German cities to cancel their weekend Christmas markets as a precautionary measure and in solidarity with the loss of Magdeburg. Berlin kept its markets open but increased police presence there.
There have been a number of extremist attacks in Germany in recent years, including a knife attack that killed three people and injured eight at a festival in the western city of Solingen in August.
Magdeburg is a city with around 240,000 inhabitants west of Berlin and the capital of Saxony-Anhalt. Friday’s attack came eight years after one An Islamic extremist drove a truck into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin, 13 people killed and hurt many others. The attacker was killed days later in a shootout in Italy.
Chancellor Scholz and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser traveled to Magdeburg on Saturday, and a funeral service is to take place in the city cathedral in the evening. Faeser ordered flags at federal buildings across the country to be lowered to half-staff.
Verified Bystander shots distributed A photo from the German Press Agency dpa showed the suspect being arrested at a tram stop in the middle of the street. A nearby police officer, pointing a gun at the man, shouted at him as he lay on his stomach with his head raised slightly. Additional officers surrounded the suspect and took him into custody.
Thi Linh Chi Nguyen, a 34-year-old manicurist from Vietnam whose salon is in a shopping center across from the Christmas market, was on the phone during a break when she heard loud bangs and initially thought they were fireworks. She then saw a car driving through the market at high speed. People screamed and a child was thrown into the air by the car.
Trembling, she described the horror of what she had seen, remembering the car rushing out of the market, turning right onto Ernst-Reuter-Allee and then coming to a stop at the tram stop where the suspect was arrested came.
The number of injured was overwhelming.
“My husband and I helped them for two hours. He ran back home and grabbed as many blankets as he could find because they didn’t have enough to cover the injured. And it was so cold,” she said.
The market itself was still cordoned off every 50 meters (yards) with red and white police tape and police cars on Saturday. Police guarded every entrance to the market with submachine guns. Some thermal blankets were still lying on the street.
Christmas markets are a German holiday tradition that has been valued since the Middle Ages and is now successfully exported to large parts of the Western world.
&Copy 2024 The Canadian Press
