The Christmas market attack toll has risen to five and German authorities are looking into the motive of a Saudi suspect who rammed his car into shoppers in Magdeburg.
More than 200 persons were injured in the attack.
The suspect, a 50 year-old Saudi doctor identified as Tabel A, has a history of anti-Islam rhetoric, officials said on Saturday.
The suspect who has lived in Germany for almost two decades was arrested at the scene.
Police searched his home overnight but the motive remained unclear.
Saudi Arabia has condemned the attack.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said, “We stand with the people of Magdeburg and all Germans on this dark day. Stay strong, dear German friends,”
The Friday evening attack on market visitors who gathered to celebrate the pre-Christmas season comes amid a fierce debate over security and migration during an election campaign in Germany.
“What a terrible act it is to injure and kill so many people there with such brutality!” Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in the central city, where he laid a white rose at a church in honour of the victims.
“We have now learned that over 200 people have been injured,” he added.
“Almost 40 are so seriously injured that we must be very worried about them.”
A spokesperson for a specialist rehabilitation clinic for criminals with addictions in Bernburg confirmed that the suspect had worked as a psychiatrist for them, but had not been at work since October due to sickness and holiday leave.
Posts on his X account, verified by Reuters, indicated support for anti-Islam and far-right parties, including the Alternative for Germany (AfD), as well as criticism of Germany for its handling of Saudi refugees.
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said the suspect’s Islamophobia was clear to see, but she declined to comment on motive.
Taleb A. appeared in a number of media interviews in 2019, including with German newspaper FAZ and the BBC.
In these interviews, he spoke of his work as an activist helping Saudi Arabians and ex-Muslims flee to Europe.
“There is no good Islam,” he told FAZ at the time.
A Saudi source told Reuters that Saudi Arabia had warned German authorities about the attacker after he posted extremist views on his personal X account that threatened peace and security.
These warnings were given multiple times since he left Saudi Arabia in 2006, the source said, without going into further detail.
A risk assessment conducted last year by German state and federal criminal investigators concluded that the man posed “no specific danger”, the Welt newspaper reported.
Germany’s domestic and foreign intelligence agencies both declined to comment on the ongoing investigation.
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 spot.
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’. If we’d stayed where we were we’d have been in the car’s path,” she said.
Tears ran down her face as she described the scene. “Children screaming, crying for mama. You can’t forget that,” she said.
Scholz’s Social Democrats are trailing both the far-right AfD and the frontrunner conservative opposition in opinion polls ahead of snap elections set for February 23.
The AfD, which enjoys particularly strong support in the former East, has led calls for a crackdown on migration to the country.
Its chancellor candidate Alice Weidel and co-leader Tino Chrupalla issued a statement on Saturday condemning the attack.
“The terrible attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg in the middle of the peaceful pre-Christmas period has shaken us,” they said.
