Germany in mourning as death toll in market attack rises to 5, including 9-year-old girl

Germans on Saturday mourned both the victims and their shaken sense of security after a man intentionally drove into a Christmas market teeming with holiday shoppers, killing at least five people, including a child, and injuring at least 200 others.

Authorities arrested a 50-year-old Saudi doctor at the site of the attack in the eastern city of Magdeburg on Friday evening and took him into custody for questioning. 

Prosecutor Horst Nopens said the suspect, a 50-year-old Saudi doctor, is under investigation on suspicion of murder, attempted murder and bodily harm. He is currently being questioned.

He has lived in Germany since 2006, practising medicine in Bernburg, about 40 kilometres south of Magdeburg, officials said

Magdeburg is a city of about 240,000 people, west of Berlin, and the capital of the state of Saxony-Anhalt.

The governor of Saxony-Anhalt, Reiner Haseloff, told reporters the death toll rose from two to five and that more than 200 people in total were injured.

A nine-year-old girl is among those killed, according to city official Ronni Krug. He said he didn't have further information on the adults who died.

He said 200 people were injured, 41 of them seriously or very seriously.

Dr. Mahmoud Elenbaby, a neurosurgeon, said some 80 patients were brought to Magdeburg's university hospital on Friday night.

"We managed to stabilize most of them, but many are still in intensive care, and some are also in critical condition," Elenbaby told The Associated Press.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser travelled to Magdeburg on Saturday, and a memorial service is to take place in the city cathedral in the evening. Faeser ordered flags lowered to half-mast at federal buildings across the country.

"There is no more peaceful and cheerful place than a Christmas market," Scholz said. "What a terrible act it is to injure and kill so many people there with such brutality."

Several German media outlets identified the suspect as Taleb A., withholding his last name in line with privacy laws, and reported that he was a specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy.

"As things stand, he is a lone perpetrator, so that as far as we know there is no further danger to the city," Haseloff told reporters.

Mourners lit candles and placed flowers outside a church near the market on the cold and gloomy day. Several people stopped and cried.

A Berlin church choir whose members witnessed a previous Christmas market attack in 2016 sang Amazing Grace, a hymn about God's mercy, offering their prayers and solidarity with the victims.

Suspect 'aggressive critic of Islam'

There were still no answers Saturday as to what caused the suspect to drive into a crowd.

The suspect arrested was Islamophobic, Faeser told reporters on Saturday.

"This was clear to see," Faeser said.

The minister declined to elaborate on the man's political affiliations.

Germany's FAZ newspaper said it interviewed the suspect in 2019, describing him as an anti-Islam activist.

"People like me, who have an Islamic background but are no longer believers, are met with neither understanding nor tolerance by Muslims here," he was quoted as saying.

"I am history's most aggressive critic of Islam. If you don't believe me, ask the Arabs."

Describing himself as a former Muslim, the suspect shared dozens of tweets and retweets daily focusing on anti-Islam themes, criticizing the religion and congratulating Muslims who left the faith.

Recently, he seemed focused on a theory that German authorities have been targeting Saudi asylum-seekers.

Magdeburg is still shaken

The violence shocked Germany and the city, bringing its mayor to the verge of tears and marring a festive event that's part of a centuries-old German tradition.

It prompted several other German towns to cancel their weekend Christmas markets as a precaution and out of solidarity with Magdeburg's loss. Berlin kept its markets open but has increased its police presence at them.

Andrea Reis, who had been at the market on Friday, returned on Saturday with her daughter Julia to lay a candle by the church overlooking the site. She said that had it not been for a matter of moments, they may have been in the car's path.

"I said, 'Let's go and get a sausage,' but my daughter said 'No, let's keep walking around,'" she said. "If we'd stayed where we were, we'd have been in the car's path." 

Tears ran down her face as she described the scene: "Children screaming, crying for mama. You can't forget that."

Germany has suffered a string of extremist attacks in recent years, including a knife attack that killed three people and wounded eight at a festival in the western city of Solingen in August.

Friday's attack came eight years after an Islamic extremist drove a truck into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin, killing 13 people and injuring many others. The attacker was killed days later in a shootout in Italy.

Witnesses recount horrifying attack

Verified bystander footage distributed by the German news agency DPA showed the suspect's arrest at a tram stop in the middle of the road. A nearby police officer pointing a handgun at the man shouted at him as he lay prone, his head arched up slightly. Other officers swarmed around the suspect and took him into custody.

Thi Linh Chi Nguyen, a 34-year-old manicurist from Vietnam working at a salon in a mall across from the Christmas market, was on the phone during a break when she heard loud bangs and thought at first they were fireworks. She then saw a car drive through the market at high speed. People screamed and a child was thrown into the air by the car, she said.

Shaking as she described the horror of what she witnessed, she recalled seeing the car bursting out of the market and turning right onto Ernst-Reuter-Allee street and then coming to a standstill at the tram stop where the suspect was arrested.

"My husband and I helped them for two hours. He ran back home and grabbed as many blankets as he could find because they didn't have enough to cover the injured people. And it was so cold," she said.

The market was still cordoned off Saturday with red-and-white tape and police vans every 50 metres. Police with machine pistols guarded every entry to the market.

Some thermal security blankets still lay on the street.

Christmas markets are a German holiday tradition cherished since the Middle Ages, now successfully exported to much of the Western world.

Saudi Arabia's foreign ministry condemned the attack on X.