Two persons including a child were killed and sixty-eight were injured after a car drove into a crowd at a Christmas market in the eastern German town of Magdeburg.
The premier of the state of Saxony Anhalt, Reiner Haseloff, told n-tv television that one of those who died was a small child.
According to government officials and the city government’s website, 15 persons have sustained serious injuries.
Regional government spokesperson Matthias Schuppe and city spokesperson Michael Reif said they suspected it was a deliberate act.
German police have arrested a doctor from Saudi Arabia who they believe rammed a car into the market on Friday evening.
Magdeburg is the state capital of Saxony-Anhalt and has about 2,40,000 residents.
Saxony-Anhalt’s Interior Minister, Tamara Zieschang, told media persons that the suspect is a 50-year-old doctor who first came to Germany in 2006.
Chancellor OIaf Scholz posted on X: “My thoughts are with the victims and their relatives. We stand beside them and beside the people of Magdeburg.”
A video published by newspaper Bild showed people trying to help what appeared to be multiple injured victims at a crowded Christmas market.
“I estimate there are at least 20 ambulances here, a lot of firefighters, and I can see the police helicopter circling in the sky,” an MDR reporter said during a live broadcast.
The reporter mentioned that there were a lot of armed police on the spot.
Eyewitnesses told MDR that the car drove straight into the crowd at the market, in the direction of the town hall.
“This is a terrible event, especially now in the days before Christmas,” head of Saxony-Anhalt state government Reiner Haseloff told MDR.
Haseloff said that he was on the way to Magdeburg.
Police and the local government’s spokesperson were not immediately available for comment.
Eight years ago, a truck driven by Anis Amri, a failed Tunisian asylum seeker with Islamist links, crashed into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people and injuring dozens of others.
