Officials in Germany say at least two people are dead and dozens are injured after a driver plowed into a Christmas market.
Verified bystander footage distributed by the German news agency dpa showed the suspect’s arrest on a walkway in the middle of the road. A nearby police officer pointing a handgun at the man shouted at him as he lay prone. Other officers soon arrived to take the man into custody. The suspect is a 50-year-old Saudi doctor who moved to Germany in 2006, Tamara Zieschang, the interior minister for the state of Saxony-Anhalt, said at a news conference. He has been practicing medicine in Bernburg, about 40 kilometers south of Magdeburg, she said.
Christmas markets are a huge part of German culture as an annual holiday tradition cherished since the Middle Ages and successfully exported to much of the Western world. In Berlin alone, more than 100 markets opened late last month and brought the smells of mulled wine, roasted almonds and bratwurst to the capital. Other markets abound across the country.
Magdeburg resident Dorin Steffen told dpa that she was at a concert in a nearby church when she heard the sirens. The cacophony was so loud “you had to assume that something terrible had happened.”“We are shaking,” Steffen said. “Full of sympathy for the relatives, also in the hope that nothing has happened to our relatives, friends and acquaintances.”
Chancellor OIaf Scholz posted on X: “My thoughts are with the victims and their relatives. We stand beside them and beside the people of Magdeburg.”
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