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A driver rammed a car into a crowd of shoppers at a busy German Christmas market on Friday evening, killing at least five people and injuring 200.
An extensive police operation is underway following the attack at the market in the German city of Magdeburg that happened at around 7pm local time on Friday.
Four women and a nine-year-old boy have been killed, with 41 people thought to still be critically injured.
A 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia was arrested on Friday following the attack and has been remanded in custody.
Identified as Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, he has been in the country since 2006 and according to local media outlets, he reportedly sympathised with the country’s far-right Alternative for Germany party.
How many people have died or injured?
At least five people were killed in the shocking incident, Saxony-Anhalt’s governor Reiner Haseloff confirmed on Saturday.
He told reporters at the scene that 200 people were injured. According to German media, 41 of these are in critical condition, 90 are seriously injured and a further 80 suffered minor injuries.
Magdeburg police confirmed that a nine-year-old boy was among the dead, and that the other victims were four women, aged 45, 52, 67 and 75.
Mr Haseloff spoke alongside German chancellor Olaf Scholz, who expressed concern about the condition of those injured. Scholz told reporters. “Almost 40 are so seriously injured that we must be very worried about them.”
Earlier, Mr Haseloff told reporters earlier that additional deaths could not be ruled out due to the number of people injured.
Who is the suspect?
The suspect is a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia, named by German media as Taleb al-Abdulmohsen.
On Saturday evening, he was remanded into custody after appearing in a court, police said.
“The judge ordered pre-trial detention for five counts of murder, multiple attempted murder and multiple counts of dangerous bodily harm,” its statement said.
Authorities confirmed that he first came to Germany in 2006 and later gained refugee status in 2016.
Local media reported that he had shown support for the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD), with a Saudi source telling Reuters that the kingdom had warned German authorities about the attacker, who the source said had posted extremist views on his personal X account.
A German security source told the news agency that tips sent by the Saudi authorities in 2023 and 2024 had been passed on to the relevant authorities. Newspaper Die Welt cited security sources as saying that a risk assessment conducted by state and federal investigators concluded that the man posed “no specific danger”.
Interior minister Nancy Faeser told reporters on Saturday: “At this point, we can only say for sure that the perpetrator was evidently Islamophobic — we can confirm that. Everything else is a matter for further investigation and we have to wait.”
He worked as a psychiatric doctor in the nearby town of Bernburg, with his workplace issuing a statement describing their shock at the attack.
Posting on Instagram, the Salus-Fachklinikum Bernburg clinic said it was “shocked to learn that the alleged perpetrator worked as a specialist doctor in our enforcement in Bernburg”.
It added that the suspect had been employed there as a psychiatric specialist since March 2020, but he had not been working since October due to illness and holiday.
‘Fairytale’ market turns into ‘war-like’ scenes
A witness told German newspaperMitteldeutsche Zeitung that she and her children jumped out of the path of the careering vehicle as it drove into the crowd.
The anonymous witness described the area as a “fairytale” before the attack.
A man who runs a burger stand told the newspaper that the driver sped past his stall and described the aftermath as “war-like”.
Another witness told Bild that her boyfriend was hit and she is frantically trying to locate him.
The woman, named Nadine, 32, told the newspaper that she had her arm around him when the car came hurtling towards them.
“He was hit and pulled away from my side. He was terrible. Nobody even screamed. You couldn’t even hear the car.”
She said her boyfriend sustained head and leg injuries and she doesn’t know where he is. “We don’t know which hospital he went to,” she said. “The uncertainty is unbearable.”
Where is the Christmas market?
The Christmas market is in the city of Magdeburg, which is west of Berlin. It is the state capital of Saxony-Anhalt and has a population of 240,000.
The large market was bustling on the last Friday before Christmas and was packed with shoppers.
It was evacuated immediately after the attack and organisers have urged the public to stay away from the area.
Footage from the scene of a cordoned-off part of the market showed debris from festive stalls on the ground.
Just yesterday, a service marking the eighth anniversary of an attack on a Christmas market in Berlin took place. In 2016, an attack carried out by Anis Amri killed 13 people and injured dozens more when he drove into a crowd.
