Five people were killed, including a child, and more than 200 injured after a car drove into a crowd at a Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg, officials say, UNN reports citing the BBC.
Details
Many people were seriously injured, Saxony-Anhalt Prime Minister Rainer Haseloff told reporters on Saturday. German media reported 41 seriously wounded.
Haseloff told reporters on Friday that the arrested suspect is a 50-year-old Saudi national who arrived in Germany in 2006 and worked as a doctor.
He said the preliminary investigation showed that the alleged attacker acted as a "lone wolf." He could not rule out more casualties due to the large number of wounded.
The motives of the alleged attacker are unclear and he has no known links to Islamic extremism - social media and online posts seem to indicate that he was criticizing Islam.
German media identified the suspect as Taleb A., a psychiatrist living in Bernburg, about 40 km south of Magdeburg. Originally from Saudi Arabia, he arrived in Germany in 2006 and was recognized as a refugee in 2016.
He ran a website that aimed to help other former Muslims escape persecution in their Gulf homeland.
According to social media posts, the suspect is an ardent critic of Islam and promotes conspiracy theories about a plot to establish Islamic domination in Europe.
Last month, German Interior Minister Nancy Feser spoke of the need for "greater vigilance" at the very popular fairs, but said there were no "concrete" signs of danger.
She also reportedly pointed to stricter gun laws in public places following a knife attack in Solingen in western Germany in August that left three people dead - an incident that reignited an already tense debate over asylum and migration in Germany.
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Friday's incident is not the first time people have been attacked at a Christmas market in Germany.
In 2016, Anis Amri, a Tunisian who had not been granted asylum in Germany and was affiliated with the so-called Islamic State (IS) group, drove a truck into a crowd gathered at a church fair in Berlin, killing 12 people and injuring 49.
Two years later, an armed man opened fire at a Christmas market in the eastern French city of Strasbourg, killing five people and injuring 11 others. The gunman was shot dead by police two days later.