The German city of Magdeburg is in a state of mourning following an attack on a busy Christmas market which killed at least five people and left hundreds more injured.
Tributes piled up on Saturday as state leaders visited the site of the attack where a driver rammed a car into crowds at around 7pm on Friday.
As a clearer picture of what happened emerged, Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed to use the full strength of the law as he called for unity across the country.
The official death toll rose throughout the day, with five people – including a nine-year-old child – confirmed dead and a further 200 injured. Mr Scholz expressed his concern for 40 of the injured, who are believed to be in a critical condition.
Minutes after the attack, the suspect was apprehended as he surrendered in the middle of the road before lying on the ground as he was taken into custody.
His motives have not yet been confirmed but he is known to be a 50-year-old Saudi doctor, who moved to Germany in 2006 and later gained refugee status in 2016.
He has been named by German media as Taleb A and has reportedly shown support for the country’s far-right Alternative for Germany party, though the party said he did not hold membership.
A Saudi source told Reuters the kingdom had warned German authorities about the suspect, 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.
Members of the Magdeburg community gathered to pay tribute to the victims at a nearby church on Saturday, with locals and politicians laying flowers, lighting candles and leaving teddy bears.
A memorial service was held in the city’s cathedral on Saturday night, with Mr Scholz and Germany’s president Frank-Walter Steinmeier joining hundreds of people who gathered to express their grief alongside tributes of candles, flowers and teddy bears.
Addressing reporters alongside Mr Scholz at the market on Saturday morning, Saxony-Anhalt’s governor Reiner Haseloff said it was “astonishing” and “unimaginable” that “something like this could happen in Germany”, as he thanked emergency services workers.
Mr Scholz went on to pledge government support for those who needed it as he condemned the attack as “barbaric”.
Calling for unity, he added: “We should not allow those who wish to sow hate to do so.”
Amid concerns that the incident could be exploited by the far right ahead of February’s national elections, the scene of a memorial in Magdeburg was reported to have become more politically charged as the day progressed on Saturday.
By the time AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla arrived at the memorial, the crowd was filled with young people who had responded from all around east Germany to calls by the far-right party’s youth wing on social media to attend a vigil, Reuters reported.
Andrea Reis, who had been at the market on Friday, returned on Saturday with her daughter Julia to place a candle by the church overlooking the site. She said that had it not been for a matter of moments, they may have been in the car’s path.
“I said, ‘Let’s go and get a sausage,’ but my daughter said, ‘No let’s keep walking around.’ If we’d stayed where we were we’d have been in the car’s path,” she said.
Tears ran down her face as she described the scene. “Children screaming, crying for mama. You can’t forget that,” she said.
