Germans have mourned the victims of an apparent attack in which authorities say a doctor drove into a busy outdoor Christmas market, killing five people and injuring 200 others.
The alleged attack on Friday evening in Magdeburg, about 80 miles west of Berlin, killed a nine-year-old and four adults and injured 41 people badly enough that authorities warned the death toll could rise.
Magdeburg marked the tragedy on Saturday with the tolling church bells at 7.04pm, the exact time of the attack in the city of roughly 240,000 people.
Among other things, investigators are looking into whether the attack could have been motivated by the suspect’s dissatisfaction with the way Germany treats Saudi refugees, Mr Nopens said.
“There is no more peaceful and cheerful place than a Christmas market,” Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz said. “What a terrible act it is to injure and kill so many people there with such brutality.”
Police have not publicly named the suspect, but several German news outlets identified him as Taleb A, withholding his last name in line with privacy laws, and reported that he was a specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy.
Describing himself as a former Muslim, the suspect appears to have been an active user of the social media platform X, sharing dozens of tweets and retweets daily focusing on anti-Islam themes, criticising the religion and congratulating Muslims who had left the faith.
He also accused German authorities of failing to do enough to combat what he referred to as the “Islamification of Europe”.
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.
Mr Scholz and interior minister Nancy Faeser travelled to Magdeburg, where a memorial service took place on Saturday. Ms Faeser ordered flags lowered to half-staff at government buildings across the country.
Verified bystander footage distributed by 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 whose salon is in a shopping centre across from the Christmas market, was on the phone during a break when she heard loud bangs that she thought 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.
The number of injured people was overwhelming.
“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 itself was still cordoned off on Saturday with red and white tape and police vans, as armed officers guarded at every entrance. Some thermal security blankets still lay on the street.
