According to the German daily Bild, a driver hit a group of people at the Christmas market in Magdeburg, in eastern Germany, around 7 p.m. this Friday, December 20. According to emergency services on site, there were 60 to 80 injured. The exact number of victims is not yet known.
The horror began at 7:04 p.m. The vehicle involved in the crime would be a dark BMW, explains the Bild newspaper.
The police of this city of around 250,000 inhabitants, capital of the state of Saxony-Anhalt, speak of a “importante intervention” underway on the Christmas market, according to a message on X.
NTV broadcaster showed numerous ambulances and fire trucks at the site, injured people being rushed to hospitals and rescuers installing aid devices for the victims.
Christmas markets, an ideological target
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser recently called on the population to be vigilant at Christmas markets, without mentioning specific threats.
Christmas markets are a “ideologically appropriate target for people motivated by Islamism“, the intelligence services had recently warned.
Germany experienced a bloody ram truck attack on a Christmas market in December 2016, claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group, which left 12 dead in the center of Berlin.
Several Islamist-motivated attacks or planned attacks, involving foreign nationals, have shocked the country in recent months.
At the end of August, a knife attack committed by a Syrian and claimed by IS left three people dead and several injured during a party in Solingen (west).
In June, another knife attack, attributed to an Afghan during an anti-Islam rally in Mannheim, left one dead, a police officer who had intervened.
In September, a 27-year-old Syrian man suspected of links to radical Islam was arrested for planning a machete attack targeting German soldiers in a Bavarian town.
