German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is traveling to Magdeburg on Saturday, a city devastated by a car attack on its Christmas market, the motives of which remain unclear despite the arrest of the alleged perpetrator, of Saudi origin.
“In the current state of the investigation it is not yet possible to categorize what happened on the Christmas market” Friday evening, indicated the local police. Olaf Scholz went 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 election campaign.
Around 7 p.m., 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.
The profile of the alleged perpetrator, presented in the German media as Taleb A., arrested on board 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 on the contrary denouncing the “dangers” of an Islamization of Germany. Some media even attribute connections to the German extreme right. He was in any case known in the community of Saudi emigrants in Germany and helped asylum seekers, particularly women.
“The motivations remain mysterious, an Islamist background seems excluded“, judges the weekly Der Spiegel.
Belgium
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