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A car crashed into a busy outdoor Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg on Friday, killing at least two people and injuring at least 68 others in what authorities suspect was an attack.
The driver of the car was arrested, German news agency dpa reported, citing unnamed government officials in the state of Saxony-Anhalt.
Saxony-Anhalt Interior Minister Tamara Zieschang told reporters that the suspect is a 50-year-old Saudi doctor who first arrived in Germany in 2006.
At least two people were killed and 68 injured, including 15 who suffered very serious injuries, according to government officials and the city government website. He said 37 people suffered medium-severity injuries and 16 suffered minor injuries.
Regional government spokesman Matthias Schuppe and city spokesman Michael Reif said they suspected this was a deliberate act.
“The images are terrible,” Reif said. “My information is that a car crashed into the Christmas market visitors, but I still can’t say in which direction or at what distance.”
Magdeburg University Hospital said it was treating between 10 and 20 patients but was preparing to receive more, dpa reported.
The sounds of first responders’ sirens clashed with the market’s Christmas decorations, including baubles, stars and leaf garlands adorning vendors’ stalls.
Images from the scene of a cordoned-off part of the market showed debris on the ground.
The car entered the market around 7pm local time, when it was packed with Christmas shoppers looking forward to the weekend.
“This is a terrible event, especially in the days before Christmas,” said Saxony-Anhalt Governor Reiner Haseloff.
Haseloff told dpa that he was heading to Magdeburg, but could not immediately give any information about the victims or what was behind the incident.
Chancellor OIaf Scholz wrote in X: “My thoughts are with the victims and their families. We are at their side and at the side of the people of Magdeburg.”
Magdeburg, west of Berlin, is the capital of the state of Saxony-Anhalt and has around 240,000 inhabitants.
The alleged attack came eight years after the attack on a Christmas market in Berlin. On December 19, 2016, an Islamic extremist plowed through a busy Christmas holiday with a truck, killing 13 people and injuring dozens more. The attacker died days later in a shooting in Italy.
Christmas markets are a large part of German culture as an annual Christmas 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, bringing the smells of mulled wine, roasted almonds and sausages to the capital. Other markets abound throughout the country.
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said late last month that there were no concrete signs of a danger to Christmas markets this year, but that it was prudent to be alert.
