German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is traveling to Magdeburg on Saturday, a city devastated by a car-ramming attack on its Christmas market, the motives of which remain unclear despite the arrest of the alleged perpetrator, of Saudi origin.
Islamist trail? Psychological disorders suffered by the 50-year-old psychiatrist arrested at the scene? Another motivation?
“In the current state of the investigation it is not yet possible to categorize what happened at the Christmas market” Friday evening, local police said.
Olaf Scholz goes there in the morning, with his Minister of the Interior, to try to find out more and provide support to the local population traumatized by this attack which occurred in the middle of the electoral campaign.
“What happened today affects a lot of people, it affects us a lot,” Fael Kelion, a 27-year-old Cameroonian living in the city, told AFP.
Around 7:00 p.m. (6:00 p.m. GMT), a powerful car suddenly rushed into the aisles of the local Christmas market, mowing down onlookers one by one in its path over 400 meters. Still provisional assessment of this carnage: two dead, including a child, and more than 60 injured, around fifteen seriously.
“We saw the roof of the car, then it happened. Everyone was then lying on the ground, children, men, injured people with open fractures, it's unimaginable,” a witness told the television channel Welt TV.
“It's terrible, there was a dead body next to me all this time. I thought I was just going to the Christmas market and such a thing happens. The world is sick,” added his partner.
The attack occurred eight years almost to the day after a similar act committed at a Berlin Christmas market, while Germany, in the middle of an electoral campaign, is on alert against the risk of attacks.
– Eight years after Berlin –
For the authorities the date is not a coincidence and was chosen deliberately. But no one immediately drew the conclusion that it was, as in Berlin in 2016, an Islamist attack.
Because the profile of the alleged perpetrator, presented in the German media as Taleb A., arrested aboard the ram car, is intriguing.
Living in Germany since 2006, a doctor practicing in the town of Bernburg, near Magdeburg and with refugee status, he was not at all known for his sympathies with the jihadist movement.
On the contrary, his frequent positions on social networks paint the portrait of a man feeling persecuted, having broken with Islam and denouncing on the contrary the “dangers” of an Islamization of Germany.
Some media even attribute connections to the German far right. In any case, he was known in the community of Saudi immigrants in Germany and helped asylum seekers, particularly women.
“The motivations remain mysterious, an Islamist background seems excluded,” judges the weekly Der Spiegel.
– Political recovery –
The German far right has nevertheless taken up this matter in the run-up to the early German legislative elections on February 23, where the question of immigration will play an important role, following several attacks committed in recent months by strangers.
“When will this madness end?” wrote on the X network the co-president of the AfD Alice Weidel, whose party is credited with second place in the polls, at almost 20%.
The party places itself behind the conservatives, who are also calling for a tightening of the screws on the reception of refugees, but ahead of the social democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
For Fael Kelion there is little doubt. “I think that since (the suspect) is a foreigner, the population will be unhappy, less welcoming,” he says.
Several capitals have expressed their “shock”, like Rome, Madrid and Washington, with the United States saying it is ready to “provide aid”.
French President Emmanuel Macron and his new Prime Minister François Bayrou expressed France's “solidarity”.
Saudi Arabia, the suspect's country of origin, condemned the attack and affirmed its “rejection of violence”.
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