Germans mourn victims of Christmas market ramming as police search for attacker’s motive
Suspect, an immigrant from Saudi Arabia, appears to have frequently shared anti-Islam sentiments online, was said to be suspicious of German authorities
Germans on Saturday mourned the victims of a deadly ramming attack in which authorities say a doctor drove into a busy outdoor Christmas market, killing five people, injuring 200 others and shaking the public’s sense of security at what would otherwise be a time of joy.
The attack Friday evening in Magdeburg, about 130 kilometers (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 the 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 immigrated 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.
Among other things, investigators are looking into whether the attack could have been motivated by the suspect’s 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.”
More on 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.
While police haven’t publicly named the suspect, several German news outlets identified him as Taleb A., withholding his last name in line with privacy laws, and AFP identified him as Taleb al-Abdulmohse. He was a specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy.
Germany has been hit by multiple deadly jihadist attacks, but evidence gathered by investigators and his past online posts painted a different picture of Abdulmohsen.
Describing himself as a former Muslim, the suspect appears to have been an active user of the social media platform X, sharing dozens of tweets and retweets daily focusing on anti-Islam themes, criticizing the religion and congratulating Muslims who had left the faith.
He also accused German authorities of failing to do enough to combat what he referred to as the “Islamification of Europe.”
In an unpublished interview with AFP from 2022 for an unrelated story, Abdulmohsen presented himself as “a Saudi atheist.”
He has helped Saudi women flee their country — but also railed against what he saw as Germany’s permissive attitude towards refugees from other mainly Muslim countries.
In his online posts, Abdulmohsen spoke about his troubles with and suspicions of German authorities.
Last August, he posted on social media: “Is there a path to justice in Germany without blowing up a German embassy or randomly slaughtering German citizens?… If anyone knows it, please let me know.”
Die Welt daily reported, citing security sources, that German state and federal police had carried out a “risk assessment” on him last year but concluded that he posed “no specific danger.”
Magdeburg is shaken
The violence shocked Germany and Magdeburg, which is the capital of the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, bringing its mayor to the verge of tears and marring the centuries-old German tradition of Christmas markets. It led several other communities to cancel their weekend Christmas markets as a precaution and out of solidarity with Magdeburg’s loss. Berlin kept its many markets open but increased its police presence at them.
Germany has suffered a string of extremist attacks in recent years, including a knife attack that killed three people and wounded eight at a festival in the western city of Solingen 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.
Chancellor Scholz and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser traveled to Magdeburg, where a memorial service took place Saturday. Faeser ordered flags lowered to half-staff at federal buildings across the country.
Although 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.
Witness recounts horrifying attack
Verified bystander footage distributed by dpa showed the suspect’s arrest at a tram stop in the middle of the road. A nearby 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.
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 that she thought were fireworks. She then saw a car drive through the market at high speed. People screamed and a child was thrown into the air by the car.
Shaking as she described what she had 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.
“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 itself was still cordoned off Saturday with red and white tape and police vans, as armed officers guarded at every entrance. Some thermal security blankets still lay on the street.
