More than a thousand people gathered in Magdeburg on Saturday evening to commemorate the victims of the attack on a Christmas market in the central German city a day earlier.
Authorities said five people, including a nine-year-old child, were killed and 200 were injured on Friday evening when a car sped through the crowds at the busy festive market.
The suspect, a 50-year-old man from Saudi Arabia, was arrested at the scene and taken into custody.
Relatives of the victims, aid workers and guests, including German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Chancellor Olaf Scholz, attended a private memorial service at the city’s cathedral on Saturday evening.
“The Christmas market as a place of peace has been destroyed,” Bishop Friedrich Kramer said.
When Scholz visited the scene of the attack earlier on Saturday, he called the incident a “terrible, insane act.”
“There is no place more peaceful and joyful than a Christmas market,” Scholz said. “It is a heinous act to harm and kill so many people with such cruelty in such a place.”
The chancellor also called for social cohesion, saying he thought it was important “that we as a country stay together, that we stay together and that we hang together, that hate does not define our togetherness.”
During the memorial service, about 1,000 people gathered outside the cathedral to watch the commemoration on a large screen, lay flowers and light candles, according to initial police estimates.
The church’s bells rang exactly 24 hours after the attack, which took place shortly after 7pm (6pm GMT) on Friday.
About 1,000 people also gathered in a central square in the city, with some chanting far-right slogans and carrying flags bearing the logo of the far-right, ultranationalist Homeland party, formerly called the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD).
Magdeburg is a city with about 237,000 inhabitants in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, about 150 kilometers west of Berlin.
Police in other German cities are now on high alert, with a spokesperson saying there will be an increased police presence at Christmas markets in Berlin.
The suspect acted alone, police say
The suspect, According to the head of the local public prosecutor’s office, Horst Walter Nopens, he, identified as Taleb A under German privacy laws, is being investigated on five counts of murder and 200 counts of attempted murder with serious bodily harm.
According to the current state of the investigation, the suspect was a lone perpetrator, police said.
City defends safety concept
Magdeburg Police Director Tom-Oliver Langhans said the suspect used an escape and rescue route to reach the Christmas market, with the entire incident lasting about three minutes.
According to the city council, the emergency route was not secured with barriers.
The route was designed to give emergency services access to the market square in the event of an emergency, city official Ronni Krug said.
However, police forces were stationed when the incident unfolded on Friday evening, meaning the entrance had not been left unprotected, he added, defending the market’s security concept which he said “has been proven for many years”.
The safety concept has been repeatedly adjusted and created “to the best of our knowledge” and was most recently tightened in November, Krug said.
The suspect is an activist critical of Islam
Taleb A is a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia, known as an activist critical of Islam. He has made erratic accusations on social media and in interviews, claiming that German authorities are not doing enough to combat Islamism.
He was previously an advocate for Saudi women fleeing their country, but later advised against seeking asylum in Germany. He wrote on his website in English and Arabic: “My advice: do not apply for asylum in Germany.”
The motive for the crime is still unclear, but the suspect may have been dissatisfied with the treatment of Saudi refugees in Germany, prosecutors said.
Taleb A arrived in Germany in 2006. Dpa has learned that he applied for asylum in February 2016 and was granted political refugee status in July of that year.
According to a spokeswoman for health company Salus, the suspect worked as a specialist in psychiatry at the forensic psychiatric department in Bernburg, a city south of Magdeburg.
Saudi Arabia warned Germany about suspect
Saudi Arabian security sources said they had warned Germany about the suspected attacker.
Riyadh had requested the suspect’s extradition, but Germany had not responded, they said.
They said the man was a Shia Muslim from the town of Al-Hofuf in eastern Saudi Arabia. Shiites are a minority in the country, making up only about 10% of the Sunni majority country.
There have been repeated reports of discrimination against Shia Muslims in Saudi Arabia.
