A car drove into people at a Christmas market in Magdeburg, eastern Germany on Friday night, according to the first reports, many people were injured and there may be fatalities, local authorities said.
Marcel Reif, the spokesman for the Magdeburg city government, said: “we do not know the details yet, but it is assumed that a terror attack took place.” According to the spokesperson, a car drove into the crowd. Local broadcaster MDR has learned from a police source that at least two people (one of them is a child) were killed and many others were injured. The driver of the vehicle was arrested. According to information from Spiegel, a suspect was arrested. The 50-year-old man referred to as Taleb A. has been living in Germany for many years. According to the first information, he was not registered as an extremist by the authorities until now.
What we know about the alleged perpetrator:
The man is a 50-year-old psychiatric and psychotherapy specialist from Saudi Arabia. He was born in 1974. He came to Germany in 2006 and lives in Bernburg, about 50 kilometers south of Magdeburg. According to WELT, a police operation took place at his residence that night. According to WELT’s information from security sources, the alleged perpetrator allegedly worked as a doctor in the Bernburg penitentiary system.
He has a permanent residence permit because he was recognized as a refugee in Germany in 2016.
“There is only one perpetrator, so according to the current state of things, there is no further danger because we were able to arrest him and the investigation is ongoing,” said Reiner Haseloff, Prime Minister of Saxony-Anhalt.
In a 2019 FAZ interview, the perpetrator described himself as “the most aggressive critic of Islam in history”. He is an atheist and applied to Aysl in Germany because he fears persecution in his home country as an unbeliever and critic of Islam. The BBC and Spiegel reported something similar in 2019. He has made it his mission to show other people persecuted in Saudi Arabia the way to asylum in places like Germany or Australia.
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