Germans mourn after 5 killed and 200 injured in driver’s suspected attack on a Christmas market
MAGDEBURG, Germany — Germans mourned on Saturday after a man drove into a Christmas market teeming with holiday shoppers, killing five people, injuring 200 others and shaking the public’s sense of security.
The alleged attack Friday evening in Magdeburg, about 80 miles west of Berlin, killed a 9-year-old and four adults and injured 41 people badly enough that authorities warned the death toll could rise.
Magdeburg marked the tragedy Saturday with tolling church bells at 7:04 p.m., the exact time of the attack in the city of roughly 240,000 people.
The driver, a 50-year-old doctor who emigrated from Saudi Arabia in 2006, surrendered to police at the scene. He’s being investigated for five counts of suspected murder and 205 counts of suspected attempted murder, prosecutor Horst Walter Nopens said at a news conference.
Investigators are looking into possible motives, including whether the suspect could have been motivated by dissatisfaction with the way Germany treats Saudi refugees, Nopens said.
“There is no more peaceful and cheerful place than a Christmas market,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz said. “What a terrible act it is to injure and kill so many people there with such brutality.”
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Mourners lighted 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.
More on the suspect police arrested
Although Nopens mentioned the treatment of Saudi immigrants angle, authorities said Saturday that they still didn’t know why the suspect drove his black BMW into the crowded market.
Police haven’t publicly named the man, but several German news outlets identified him as Taleb A., withholding his last name in line with privacy laws, and reported that he was a specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy.
The suspect, who described himself as a former Muslim, appears to have been an active user of the social media platform X, where he shared dozens of tweets and retweets daily focusing on anti-Islam themes, criticizing the religion and congratulating Muslims who left the faith.
He also accused German authorities of failing to do enough to combat what he referred to as the “Islamification of Europe.”
Magdeburg is shaken
The incident shocked Germany and Magdeburg, the capital of the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, 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 towns in Germany to cancel their weekend Christmas markets as a precaution and in solidarity with Magdeburg. Berlin kept its markets open but has increased the police presence at them.
Europe’s most wanted man was shot dead in Milan by a routine police patrol on Friday, four days after he allegedly drove a truck into a Christmas fair in Berlin, killing 12 and wounding dozens.
Friday’s alleged 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.
Chancellor Scholz and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser traveled to Magdeburg, where a memorial service took place on Saturday. Faeser ordered flags lowered to half-staff at federal buildings across the country.
As many people went to the site with candles to mourn the victims, several hundred far-right protesters gathered in a central square in Magdeburg with a banner that read “Remigration,” German news agency DPA reported.
A recount of the horrifying incident
Verified bystander video distributed by DPA showed the suspect’s arrest at a tram stop in the middle of a street. A 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.
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Thi Linh Chi Nguyen, a 34-year-old manicurist from Vietnam whose salon is in a mall across from the Christmas market, was on the phone during a break when she heard loud bangs. She thought at first they were fireworks, then saw a vehicle driving through the market at high speed. People screamed and a child was thrown into the air by the car.
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.
The number of injured people was overwhelming, Nguyen said.
“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 yards. Police with machine pistols guarded every entry to the market. Some thermal security blankets still lay on the street.
Grieshaber, Moulson and Gera write for the Associated Press. They reported from Magdeburg, Berlin and Warsaw, respectively.
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