Policemen guard a Christmas Market, the place a automobile drove right into a crowd on Friday night, in Magdeburg, Germany, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. —Photograph from the Related Press
MAGDEBURG, Germany — Germans on Saturday mourned the victims of an obvious assault during which authorities say a health care provider drove right into a busy out of doors Christmas market, killing 5 folks, injuring 200 others, and shaking the general public’s sense of safety at what would in any other case be a time of pleasure.
The alleged assault Friday night in Magdeburg, about 130 kilometers (80 miles) west of Berlin, killed a 9-year-old and 4 adults and injured 41 folks badly sufficient that authorities warned the demise toll might rise.
Magdeburg marked the tragedy Saturday with the tolling church bells at 7:04 p.m., the precise time of the assault within the metropolis of roughly 240,000 folks.
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The driving force, a 50-year-old physician who immigrated from Saudi Arabia in 2006, surrendered to police on the scene. He’s being investigated for 5 counts of suspected homicide and 205 counts of suspected tried homicide, prosecutor Horst Walter Nopens mentioned at a information convention.
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Amongst different issues, investigators are trying into whether or not the assault might have been motivated by the suspect’s dissatisfaction with the best way Germany treats Saudi refugees, Nopens mentioned.
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“There isn’t any extra peaceable and cheerful place than a Christmas market,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz mentioned. “What a horrible act it’s to injure and kill so many individuals there with such brutality.”
Extra on arrested suspect
Though Nopens talked about the therapy of Saudi immigrants angle, authorities mentioned Saturday that they nonetheless didn’t know why the suspect drove his black BMW into the crowded market.
Police haven’t publicly named the suspect, however a number of German information retailers recognized him as Taleb A., withholding his final identify according to privateness legal guidelines, and reported that he was a specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy.
Describing himself as a former Muslim, the suspect seems to have been an energetic consumer of the social media platform X, sharing dozens of tweets and retweets each day specializing in anti-Islam themes, criticizing the faith and congratulating Muslims who had left the religion.
He additionally accused German authorities of failing to do sufficient to fight what he known as the “Islamification of Europe.”
Magdeburg is shaken
The violence shocked Germany and Magdeburg, which is the capital of the japanese state of Saxony-Anhalt, bringing its mayor to the verge of tears and marring the centuries-old German custom of Christmas markets. It led a number of different communities to cancel their weekend Christmas markets as a precaution and out of solidarity with Magdeburg’s loss. Berlin stored its many markets open however elevated its police presence at them.
Germany has suffered a string of extremist assaults lately, together with a knife assault that killed three folks and wounded eight at a competition within the western metropolis of Solingen in August.
Friday’s assault got here eight years after an Islamic extremist drove a truck right into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin, killing 13 folks and injuring many others. The attacker was killed days later in a shootout in Italy.
Chancellor Scholz and Inside Minister Nancy Faeser traveled to Magdeburg, the place a memorial service occurred Saturday. Faeser ordered flags lowered to half-staff at federal buildings throughout the nation.
Though many individuals went to the positioning with candles to mourn the victims, a number of hundred far-right protesters gathered in a central sq. in Magdeburg with a banner that learn “remigration,” German information company dpa reported.
Witness recounts horrifying assault
Verified bystander footage distributed by dpa confirmed the suspect’s arrest at a tram cease in the midst of the street. A close-by police officer pointing a handgun on the man shouted at him as he lay susceptible, his head arched up barely. Different officers swarmed across the suspect and took him into custody.
Thi Linh Chi Nguyen, a 34-year-old manicurist from Vietnam whose salon is in a mall throughout from the Christmas market, was on the cellphone throughout a break when she heard loud bangs that she thought had been fireworks. She then noticed a automobile drive via the market at excessive pace. Folks screamed and a baby was thrown into the air by the automobile.
Shaking as she described what she had witnessed, she recalled seeing the automobile bursting out of the market and turning proper onto Ernst-Reuter-Allee road after which coming to a standstill on the tram cease the place the suspect was arrested.
The variety of injured folks was overwhelming.
“My husband and I helped them for 2 hours. He ran again dwelling and grabbed as many blankets as he might discover as a result of they didn’t have sufficient to cowl the injured folks. And it was so chilly,” she mentioned.
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The market itself was nonetheless cordoned off Saturday with crimson and white tape and police vans, as armed officers guarded at each entrance. Some thermal safety blankets nonetheless lay on the road.