Death toll in attack on Christmas market in Germany rises to 5, more than 200 injured

MAGDEBURG – 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 for almost two decades and practices as a doctor in Bernburg, about 40 kilometers south of Magdeburg. officials said.

The prime minister of the surrounding state of Saxony-Anhalt, Reiner Haseloff, told reporters the death toll had risen from two to five and that more than 200 people had been injured in total.

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.

The man behind the attack

There were no answers Saturday as to why he drove into a crowd in the eastern German city of Magdeburg.

The suspect described himself as a former Muslim and shared dozens of tweets and retweets daily that focused on Islamophobic themes, criticized religion and congratulated Muslims who had given up the faith.

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.

Lately he seemed to be focused on his theory that German authorities are targeting Saudi asylum seekers.

Prominent German terrorism expert Peter Neumann said he had never come across a suspect with this profile who had been involved in an act of mass violence.

“After 25 years in this ‘business’ you think nothing could surprise you. But a 50-year-old Saudi ex-Muslim who lives in East Germany, loves the AfD and wants to punish Germany for its tolerance of Islamists – that really wasn’t on my radar,” says Neumann, director of the International Center for the study Radicalization and political violence at King’s College London, wrote on X.

“According to the current status, it is an individual perpetrator, so as far as we know there is no further danger to the city,” Saxony-Anhalt’s state governor Reiner Haseloff told journalists. “Every life lost in this attack is a terrible tragedy and one life too many.”

Magdeburg is still shaken

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 an Islamic extremist drove a truck into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin, killing 13 people and wounding many more. 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.

A retelling of the horrific attack

Verified passerby footage distributed by 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 with red and white tape and police cars every 50 meters (about 54 yards) on Saturday. Police guarded every entrance to the market with submachine guns.

Some thermal blankets were still lying on the street.

Christmas markets have been a German holiday tradition that has been valued since the Middle Ages and is now successfully exported to large parts of the Western world.

The Saudi Arabian Foreign Ministry condemned the attack on X.

___

Aboubakr reported from Cairo and Gera from Warsaw, Poland.