German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is traveling this Saturday, December 21, to Magdeburg, a city in eastern Germany damaged by a car-ramming attack the day before, on its Christmas market. According to a still provisional report, two people were killed, including a child, and more than 60 others injured, around fifteen seriously. The alleged perpetrator, whose motivations remain unclear, was arrested.
The facts
Around 7 p.m. local time, a car suddenly rushed into the aisles of the Magdeburg Christmas market, mowing down onlookers one by one in its path, for nearly 400 meters, before finally being stopped. “We saw the roof of the car, then it happened. Everyone was then lying on the ground, children, men, injured people with open fractures, it’s unimaginable,” a witness told the television channel Welt TV.
“It’s terrible, there was a dead body next to me all this time. I thought I was just going to the Christmas market and such a thing happens. The world is sick,” added his partner. The attack occurred eight years almost to the day after a similar act committed at a Berlin Christmas market, while Germany, in the middle of an electoral campaign, is on alert against the risk of attacks.
The author
For authorities, the date is not a coincidence and was chosen deliberately. But no one immediately drew the conclusion that it was, as in Berlin in 2016, an Islamist attack. Because the profile of the alleged perpetrator, presented in the German media as Taleb A., arrested aboard the ram car, is intriguing.
Living in Germany since 2006, a doctor practicing in the town of Bernburg, near Magdeburg, and having refugee status, he was not at all known for his sympathies with the jihadist movement. On the contrary, his frequent positions on social networks paint the portrait of a man feeling persecuted, having broken with Islam and denouncing on the contrary the “dangers” of an Islamization of Germany.
Some media even attribute connections to the German extreme right. In any case, he was known in the community of Saudi immigrants in Germany and helped asylum seekers, particularly women. “The motivations remain mysterious, an Islamist background seems excluded,” judges the weekly Der Spiegel. “In the current state of the investigation, it is not yet possible to categorize what happened on the Christmas market,” local police said Friday evening.
The reactions
The German far right has nevertheless taken up this matter in the run-up to the early German legislative elections on February 23, where the question of immigration will play an important role, following several attacks committed in recent years. months by foreigners. “When will this madness end?” wrote on the X network the co-president of the AfD, Alice Weidel, whose party is credited with second place in the polls, at almost 20%.
Several capitals expressed their “shock”, like Rome, Madrid and Washington, with the United States saying it was ready to “provide aid”. The French President, Emmanuel Macron, and his new Prime Minister, François Bayrou, expressed France’s “solidarity”. Saudi Arabia, the suspect’s country of origin, condemned the attack and affirmed its “rejection of violence”.