At least 2 dead and 60 hurt after a car drives into a German Christmas market in a suspected attack

BERLIN —  A car plowed into a busy outdoor Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg on Friday, leaving at least two people dead and injuring at least 60 others in what some officials say they suspect was an attack.

The driver was arrested shortly after the car barreled into the market around 7 p.m., when it was teeming with holiday shoppers.

The suspect is a 50-year-old Saudi doctor who first came to Germany in 2006, Tamara Zieschang, the interior minister for the state of Saxony-Anhalt, said at a news conference. He has been practicing medicine in Bernburg, just over 20 miles south of Magdeburg, she said.

Regional government spokesperson Matthias Schuppe and city spokesperson Michael Reif said officials suspected it was a deliberate act.

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

Fifteen of the injured were hurt very seriously, according to government officials and the city government’s website.

Haseloff said that the two people confirmed to have died were an adult and a toddler, and that he couldn’t rule out further deaths.

“But that is speculation now. Every human life that has fallen victim to this attack is a terrible tragedy and one human life too many,” he said.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz posted on X: “My thoughts are with the victims and their relatives. We stand beside them and beside the people of Magdeburg.”

The city, which is west of Berlin, is the state capital of Saxony-Anhalt and has about 240,000 residents.

The incident in Magdeburg took place eight years after an Islamist extremist drove a truck into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin, killing 13 people and injuring dozens more. The attacker was killed days later in a shootout in Italy.

Christmas markets are a huge part of German culture as an annual holiday tradition cherished since the Middle Ages and successfully exported to much of the Western world. The markets abound across the country; in Berlin alone, more than 100 opened late last month, bringing the scents of mulled wine, roasted almonds and bratwurst to the capital.

German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said late last month that there were no concrete indications of a danger to Christmas markets this year, but that it was wise to be vigilant.

Magdeburg resident Dorin Steffen told German news agency DPA that she was at a concert in a nearby church when she heard the sirens of emergency vehicles. The cacophony was so loud, she said, that “you had to assume that something terrible had happened.”

She called the attack “a dark day” for the city.

“We are shaking,” Steffen said. “Full of sympathy for the relatives, also in the hope that nothing has happened to our relatives, friends and acquaintances.”