A car plowed into a busy outdoor Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg on Friday, killing at least two people and injuring at least 60 others in what authorities suspect was a deliberate attack.
The driver was arrested shortly after the car barrelled into the market at around 7 p.m. local time, when it was teeming with holiday shoppers looking forward to the weekend.
Tamara Zieschang, the interior minister for the state of Saxony-Anhalt, told reporters that the suspect is a 50-year-old Saudi doctor who first came to Germany in 2006.
Saxony-Anhalt’s governor, Reiner Haseloff, said the suspect appears to be a “lone perpetrator, so that as far as we know there is no further danger to the city.”
Haseloff said the two people confirmed to have died were an adult and a toddler, but that he couldn’t rule out further deaths.
“It is really one of the worst things one can imagine, particularly in connection with what a Christmas market should bring,” he said.
Magdeburg Mayor Simone Borris, on the verge of tears, said officials plan to arrange a memorial at the city’s cathedral on Saturday.
Fifteen of the injured were were hurt very seriously, according to government officials and the city government’s website.
A video posted on social media from a position above the market shows a car driving at speed through a crowd walking between two rows of market stalls. People can be seen knocked to the ground and running away. Reuters was able to verify the location, with the trees, outline and design of the buildings matching file and satellite imagery of the area.
The suspected attack in Magdeburg, a city of about 240,000 people west of Berlin, comes eight years after an Islamic extremist plowed through a crowded Christmas market in the capital with a truck, killing 13 people and injuring dozens more. The attacker was killed days later in a shootout in Italy
