This December 20, 2024, a car drove into the Christmas market in the city of Magdeburg, Germany. The exact number of victims is not yet known, but between 60 and 80 injured are to be deplored. Some local press headlines mention around ten deaths. The town hall confirms one. Eight years ago, twelve people were killed in similar circumstances in Berlin.
A car crashed into a crowd at a Christmas market on Friday in the German city of Magdeburg, injuring more than 60 people, local authorities said, suspecting a “attack”, just eight years after a similar act in Berlin.
A man arrested
A suspect was arrested near the market, police later announced. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz estimated that the events in this city left “predict the worst”.
Between “60 and 80 people” were injured, including several “seriously”the emergency services of this northern German city, located in the regional state of Saxony-Anhalt, told AFP.
The regional Ministry of the Interior also indicated to AFP that it was based on the principle that it was “of an attack”.
“This is a terrible event, in the days leading up to Christmas,” Minister President of Saxony-Anhalt Reiner Haseloff told public broadcaster MDR.
According to the emergency services, several of the injured are “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 “importante intervention” underway on 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.
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser recently called on the population to be vigilant at Christmas markets, without mentioning any specific threats.
Christmas markets are a “ideologically appropriate target for people motivated by Islamism”, had recently warned the intelligence services.
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 a “deep sympathy for the Islamic State terrorist group” (EI), indicate these sources 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 well as many countries in the world.
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