Germany mourns 5 lifeless, 200 injured in Christmas market assault

Germans mourned the victims of an obvious assault by which authorities say a health care provider drove right into a busy outside Christmas market, killing 5 individuals and injuring 200 others.

The suspected assault Friday night in Magdeburg, about 130 kilometers west of Berlin, killed a nine-year-old youngster and 4 adults and injured 41 individuals severely sufficient that authorities warned the toll might rise.

Magdeburg marked the tragedy on Saturday with the sound of church bells at 7:04 p.m., the precise time of the assault within the metropolis of round 240,000 inhabitants.

The driving force, a 50-year-old physician who immigrated from Saudi Arabia in 2006, turned himself in to the police on the scene. He’s being investigated for 5 counts of suspected homicide and 205 counts of tried homicide, prosecutor Horst Walter Nopens mentioned at a information convention.

Investigators are notably trying into whether or not the assault might have been motivated by the suspect’s dissatisfaction with Germany’s therapy of Saudi refugees, Nopens mentioned.

“There isn’t any place extra peaceable and joyful than a Christmas market,” mentioned German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. “What a horrible act to injure and kill so many individuals with such brutality. »

Though Mr. Nopens spoke in regards to the therapy of Saudi immigrants, authorities mentioned Saturday that they nonetheless didn’t know why the suspect was driving his black BMW by way of the crowded market.

Police haven’t publicly named the suspect, however a number of German media retailers recognized him as Taleb A, refusing to launch his final title in accordance 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 person of the social media platform religion.

He additionally accused German authorities of not doing sufficient to fight what he referred to as the “Islamization of Europe.”

The violence shocked Germany and Magdeburg, the capital of the japanese state of Saxony-Anhalt, bringing its mayor to tears and undermining the centuries-old German custom of Christmas markets. This led a number of different communities to cancel their weekend Christmas markets as a precaution and in solidarity with the lack of Magdeburg. Berlin has saved its many markets open however has elevated the police presence there.

Germany has suffered a sequence of extremist assaults lately, together with a knife assault that killed three individuals and injured eight others at a competition in Solingen, within the west of the nation, in august.

Friday’s assault got here eight years after an Islamist extremist rammed a truck right into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin, killing 13 individuals and injuring many others. The attacker was killed a number of days later in a taking pictures in Italy.

Mr. Scholz and Inside Minister Nancy Faeser visited Magdeburg, the place a memorial ceremony occurred on Saturday. Ms Faeser ordered flags to be flown at half-mast in authorities buildings throughout the nation.

Though many individuals turned out with candles to mourn the victims, a number of hundred far-right protesters gathered in a central sq. in Magdeburg with a banner studying “remigration”, reported German press company dpa.

Verified footage of passers-by distributed by dpa reveals 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, yelled at him as he lay on his abdomen along with his head barely bowed. Different officers surrounded the suspect and took him into custody.

Thi Linh Chi Nguyen, a 34-year-old Vietnamese manicurist whose salon is in a shopping mall throughout from the Christmas market, was on the cellphone throughout a break when she heard a loud bang that she thought was a hearth. artifice. She then noticed a automobile driving by way of the market at excessive pace. Folks screamed and a toddler was thrown into the air by the automobile.

Trembling as she described what she had witnessed, she recalled seeing the automobile pace out of the market and switch proper onto Ernst-Reuter-Allee, then cease on the tram cease the place the suspect had been arrested.

The variety of injured was overwhelming.

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

The market itself was nonetheless cordoned off on Saturday with pink and white tape and police vans, whereas armed officers guarded every entrance. Some thermal security blankets have been nonetheless mendacity on the road.