Germany | Two dead and 68 injured in car-ramming attack

(Berlin) The car-ramming “attack” targeting the crowd at a Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg (North) left two dead and 68 injured, according to a new report provided Friday evening by the municipality.

Among them, there are 15 people “seriously injured, the others having suffered injuries of severity described as “medium” or “light”, affirmed the town hall, specifying “that a car drove at high speed into the crowd present on the Christmas market.

The suspect, arrested at the scene, is a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia, local authorities said on Friday.

“We have arrested the perpetrator” of the attack and “it is a man from Saudi Arabia who works as a doctor here” in the Saxony-Anhalt region, said the head of the regional government, Reiner Haseloff, specifying that he had “acted alone”.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said the events in this city “foreshadowed the worst”.

Between “60 and 80 people” were injured, several of them “seriously”, the emergency services of this town in northern Germany, located in the regional state of Saxony-Anhalt, told AFP.

The regional Interior Ministry also told AFP it was assuming that it was “an attack”.

“This is a terrible event in the days before Christmas,” Minister President of Saxony-Anhalt Reiner Haseloff told public broadcaster MDR.

According to the emergency services, several of the injured were “seriously” following this act involving “a car”. Some media speak of several deaths but the authorities did not immediately confirm.

The police of this city of around 250,000 inhabitants, capital of the state of Saxony-Anhalt, speak of a “major intervention” underway in the Christmas market, according to a message on X.

Call for vigilance

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.

The Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, recently called on the population to be vigilant at Christmas markets, without mentioning specific threats.

Christmas markets are an “ideologically appropriate target for people motivated by Islamism,” intelligence services recently warned.

Previous from Berlin

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 and more than 60 injured.

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.

And recently, three young suspected jihadists suspected of preparing an attack were arrested in southwest Germany, the federal prosecutor's office and the police announced on Tuesday.

Among them, two German-Lebanese brothers, aged 15 and 20, are suspected of having “concretely prepared an attack” motivated by “deep sympathy for the terrorist group Islamic State” (IS), these sources indicate in a press release. .

Since the unprecedented attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas against Israel on October 7, 2023, which triggered the war in the Gaza Strip, German authorities have increased their vigilance in the face of the Islamist threat and the resurgence of anti-Semitism, as many countries around the world.