Germany in mourning as death toll in market attack rises to 5, more than 200 wounded

Germans on Saturday mourned both the victims and their shaken sense of security after a man intentionally drove into a Christmas market teeming with holiday shoppers, killing at least five people, including a child, and injuring at least 200 others.

Authorities arrested a 50-year-old Saudi doctor at the site of the attack in the eastern city of Magdeburg on Friday evening and took him into custody for questioning. He has lived in Germany for nearly two decades, practising medicine in Bernburg, about 40 kilometres south of Magdeburg, officials said.

Magdeburg is a city of about 240,000 people, west of Berlin, and the capital of the state of Saxony-Anhalt.

The governor of Saxony-Anhalt, Reiner Haseloff, told reporters that the death toll rose from two to five and that more than 200 people in total were injured.

Officials say a nine-year-old girl is among those killed.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that nearly 40 of them “are so seriously injured that we must be very worried about them.”

Scholz and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser travelled to Magdeburg on Saturday, and a memorial service is to take place in the city cathedral in the evening. Faeser ordered flags lowered to half-mast at federal buildings across the country.

Several German media outlets identified the suspect as Taleb A., withholding his last name in line with privacy laws, and reported that he was a specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy.

“As things stand, he is a lone perpetrator, so that as far as we know there is no further danger to the city,” Haseloff told reporters.

“Every human life that has fallen victim to this attack is a terrible tragedy and one human life too many.”

Mourners lit candles and placed flowers outside a church near the market on the cold and gloomy day. Several people stopped and cried.

A Berlin church choir whose members witnessed a previous Christmas market attack in 2016 sang Amazing Grace, a hymn about God’s mercy, offering their prayers and solidarity with the victims.

Suspect ‘aggressive critic of Islam’

There were still no answers Saturday as to what caused the suspect to drive into a crowd.

The suspect arrested was Islamophobic, Faeser told reporters on Saturday.

“This was clear to see,” Faeser said.

The minister declined to elaborate on the man’s political affiliations.

Germany’s FAZ newspaper said it interviewed the suspect in 2019, describing him as an anti-Islam activist.

“People like me, who have an Islamic background but are no longer believers, are met with neither understanding nor tolerance by Muslims here,” he was quoted as saying.

“I am history’s most aggressive critic of Islam. If you don’t believe me, ask the Arabs.”

Describing himself as a former Muslim, the suspect shared dozens of tweets and retweets daily focusing on anti-Islam themes, criticizing the religion and congratulating Muslims who left the faith.

Recently, he seemed focused on a theory that German authorities have been targeting Saudi asylum-seekers.

Prominent German terrorism expert Peter Neumann said he had yet to come across a suspect in an act of mass violence with that profile.

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

Magdeburg is still shaken

The violence shocked Germany and the city, bringing its mayor to the verge of tears and marring a festive event that’s part of a centuries-old German tradition.

It prompted several other German towns to cancel their weekend Christmas markets as a precaution and out of solidarity with Magdeburg’s loss. Berlin kept its markets open but has increased its police presence at them.

Andrea Reis, who had been at the market on Friday, returned on Saturday with her daughter Julia to lay a candle by the church overlooking the site. She said that had it not been for a matter of moments, they may have been in the car’s path.

“I said, ‘Let’s go and get a sausage,’ but my daughter said ‘No, let’s keep walking around,'” she said. “If we’d stayed where we were, we’d have been in the car’s path.” 

Tears ran down her face as she described the scene: “Children screaming, crying for mama. You can’t forget that.”

Germany has suffered a string of extremist attacks in recent years, including a knife attack that killed three people and wounded eight at a festival in the western city of Solingen in August.

Friday’s attack came eight years after an Islamic extremist drove a truck into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin, killing 13 people and injuring many others. The attacker was killed days later in a shootout in Italy.

A recount of the horrifying attack

Verified bystander footage distributed by the German news agency DPA showed the suspect’s arrest at a tram stop in the middle of the road. A nearby police officer pointing a handgun at the man shouted at him as he lay prone, his head arched up slightly. Other officers swarmed around the suspect and took him into custody.

Thi Linh Chi Nguyen, a 34-year-old manicurist from Vietnam at salon in a mall across from the Christmas market, was on the phone during a break when she heard loud bangs and thought at first they were fireworks. She then saw a car drive through the market at high speed. People screamed and a child was thrown into the air by the car, she said.

Shaking as she described the horror of what she witnessed, she recalled seeing the car bursting out of the market and turning right onto Ernst-Reuter-Allee street and then coming to a standstill at the tram stop where the suspect was arrested.

“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 people. And it was so cold,” she said.

The market was still cordoned off Saturday with red-and-white tape and police vans every 50 metres. Police with machine pistols guarded every entry to the market.

Some thermal security blankets still lay on the street.

Christmas markets are a German holiday tradition cherished since the Middle Ages, now successfully exported to much of the Western world.

Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry condemned the attack on X.