Gerguys on Saturday mourned those affected and their shattered sense of security after a man deliberately entered a Christmas market packed with Christmas shoppers, killing at least five people, plus a child, and injuring at least two hundred others.
Authorities arrested a 50-year-old Saudi doctor at the scene of the attack in the eastern city of Magdeburg on Friday night and detained him for questioning.
Prosecutor Horst Nopens said the suspect, a 50-year-old Saudi doctor, is being investigated for murder, attempted murder and assault. He’s been interrogated lately.
He has lived in Germany since 2006 and practices medicine in Bernburg, about 40 kilometers south of Magdeburg, he explained.
Magdeburg is a city of about 240,000 inhabitants west of Berlin and the capital of the state of Saxony-Anhalt.
Saxony-Anhalt Governor Reiner Haseloff told reporters that the death toll had risen from two to five and that in total more than two hundred people had been injured.
A nine-year-old woman among the ones killed, according to municipal official Ronni Krug. He said he had no extra data about the adults who died.
Another two hundred people were injured, 41 of them seriously or very seriously, he added.
Dr. Mahmoud Elenbaby, a neurosurgeon, said some patients were taken to Magdeburg University Hospital on Friday night.
“We have managed to stabilize as many of them as possible, but many are still in intensive care and some are also in critical condition,” Elenbaby told The Associated Press.
German Chancellor Olaf 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.
“There is no more peaceful and cheerful place than a Christmas market,” Scholz said. “What a terrible act it is to injure and kill so many people there with such brutality.”
Several German media outlets identified the suspect as Taleb A. , without revealing his last name, in line with privacy laws, and said he was a specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy.
“As it stands, this is a lone perpetrator, so as we know, there is no additional danger to the city,” Haseloff told reporters.
Mourners lit candles and laid flowers outside a church near the market on a cold, gloomy day. Several other people stopped and wept.
A Berlin church choir whose members witnessed a past attack on a Christmas marketplace in 2016 sang Amazing Grace, a hymn to God’s mercy, their prayers and solidarity with the victims.
There was still no answer Saturday as to what caused the suspect to be in the crowd.
The detainee is suspected of Islamophobia, Faeser told reporters on Saturday.
“It’s transparent to see,” Faeser said.
The minister declined to give further details about the man’s political affiliations.
German newspaper FAZ interviewed the suspect in 2019 and described him as an anti-Islam activist.
“People like me, who are of Islamic origin but are no longer believers, find neither understanding nor tolerance on the part of Muslims here,” he quoted.
“I am the maximum competitive critic of Islam in history. If you do not 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.
It recently appeared that the German government is targeting Saudi asylum seekers.
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.
This led other German cities to cancel their weekend Christmas markets, as a precaution and in solidarity with the loss of Magdeburg. Berlin has kept its markets open but has reinforced the police presence there.
Andrea Reis, who was at the market on Friday, returned on Saturday with her daughter Julia to leave a candle near the church that overlooks the place. She said if it hadn’t been for a few moments, they may have simply been in the car’s path.
“I said, ‘Let’s go get a sausage,’ but my daughter said, ‘No, let’s keep walking,'” he said. “If we had stayed where we were, we would have been in the car. ”
Tears streamed down her face as she described the scene: “Kids screaming, crying for mom. You can’t do that. “
Germany has suffered a series of extremist attacks in recent years, adding a knife attack that killed 3 other people and injured 8 others at a festival in Solingen, in the west of the country, 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.
Verified footage published by German news agency DPA shows the suspect being arrested at a tram stop in the middle of the road. A nearby police officer, pointing a gun at the man, yelled at him as he lay face down with his head bowed. Other police officers surrounded the suspect and took him into custody.
Thi Linh Chi Nguyen, a 34-year-old Vietnamese manicurist working in a salon in a shopping center across from the Christmas market, was talking on the phone during a break when she heard a loud bang and her first thought was that it was fireworks. He saw a car crossing the market at full speed. People screamed and a child was thrown through the car through the air, he said.
Trembling as he describes the horror of what he witnessed, he remembers seeing the car speed out of the market and turn right onto Ernst-Reuter-Allee, then stop at the tram stop where the suspect was arrested.
“My husband and I helped them for two hours. He ran home and retrieved as many blankets as he could find because they didn’t have enough to cover the wounded. And it was very cold,” she said.
The market was still cordoned off on Saturday with red and white tape and police vans every 50 meters each. Police armed with machine guns guarded each of the fronts of the market.
Some thermal protection blankets were still lying on the street.
Christmas markets have been a German Christmas culture since the Middle Ages and are now effectively exported to much of the Western world.
The Saudi Foreign Ministry condemned the incident of X.
#Declaración | The Ministry of Foreign Affairs expresses the condemnation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for the incident that occurred in a market in the town of Magdeburg, in the Federal Republic of Germany, in which a car ran over the crowd, causing deaths and injuries. of several people. . twitter. com/Ozc85f0GpZ
With Reuters
Public Relations, CBC P. O. Box 500, Branch A Toronto, ON Canada, M5W 1E6
Toll Free (Canada Only): 1-866-306-4636
It is a precedent for CBC to create products that are available to everyone in Canada, adding other people with visual, hearing, motor and cognitive disabilities.
Closed Captioning and Described Video is available for many CBC shows offered on CBC Gem.