Germany Christmas attack: 9-year-old among 5 dead, 200 injured

MAGDEBURG, Germany –

Germans on Saturday mourned the victims of an obvious assault wherein authorities say a physician drove right into a busy outside Christmas market, killing 5 individuals, injuring 200 others and shaking the general public’s sense of safety at what would in any other case be a time of pleasure and marvel.

The alleged assault Friday night in Magdeburg, about 130 kilometres (80 miles) west of Berlin, killed a nine-year-old and 4 adults and injured 41 individuals badly sufficient that authorities warned the demise toll may 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 individuals.

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.

Amongst different issues, investigators are wanting into whether or not the assault may have been motivated by the suspect’s dissatisfaction with the best way Germany treats Saudi refugees, Nopens mentioned.

“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 the suspect police arrested

Though Nopens talked about the remedy of Saudi immigrants angle, authorities mentioned Saturday that they nonetheless did not know why the suspect drove his black BMW into the crowded market.

Police have not publicly named the suspect, however a number of German information shops recognized him as Taleb A., withholding his final title consistent with 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 lively 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 jap 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 saved its many markets open however elevated its police presence at them.

Germany has suffered a string of extremist assaults in recent times, together with a knife assault that killed three individuals and wounded eight at a pageant 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 individuals 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 on Saturday, and a memorial service is to happen within the metropolis cathedral within the night. Faeser ordered flags lowered to half-staff at federal buildings throughout the nation.

A witness recounts the horrifying assault

Verified bystander footage distributed by the German information company dpa confirmed the suspect’s arrest at a tram cease in the course of the highway. A close-by police officer pointing a handgun on the man shouted at him as he lay inclined, 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 telephone throughout a break when she heard loud bangs that she thought had been fireworks. She then noticed a automotive drive by way of the market at excessive pace. Folks screamed and a toddler was thrown into the air by the automotive.

Shaking as she described what she had witnessed, she recalled seeing the automotive bursting out of the market and turning proper onto Ernst-Reuter-Allee avenue after which coming to a standstill on the tram cease the place the suspect was arrested.

The variety of injured individuals was overwhelming.

“My husband and I helped them for 2 hours. He ran again house and grabbed as many blankets as he may discover as a result of they didn’t have sufficient to cowl the injured individuals. And it was so chilly,” she mentioned.

The market itself was nonetheless cordoned off Saturday with purple and white tape and police vans, as armed officers guarded at each entrance. Some thermal safety blankets nonetheless lay on the road.

Moulson reported from Berlin and Gera from Warsaw, Poland.