In the bleak Magdeburg midwinter, police tape fluttered beside torn tinsel at what, 24 hours earlier, had been a bustling Christmas market.
In this paralysed eastern German city of 240,000, people clustered in groups and gazed in shock at where a black SUV sliced through an alley of flashing lights and chat, flinging bodies left and right.
“After, there was just a terrible, deadly silence,” said Philip, a 23-year-old paramedic, who was at the market with friends.
He was 2m away as the car raced by, just as he decided to step out for something to eat: “If I’d decided 10 seconds earlier, I would have been hit. The people flew through the air.”
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Johannes Rörig arrived 10 minutes after the attack and saw a “scene of horror”. His partner, three huts away from the passing car, was at home and still in shock.
“I’ll never forget the trail of bodies, people lying with limbs at strange angles,” said Johannes. “The first minutes were just chaos, people running and trying to help.”
Both young men began first aid and Johannes saw one woman die as he helped her.
On Saturday afternoon, police in black riot gear stood watch at a scene like an abandoned stage set, where empty pink roast almond bags lay alongside empty blue medical gloves.
A pile of red and grey woollen army blankets lay in a crumped pile beneath the candy stripe awning of an abandoned wooden hut as a gold-and-silver thermal blanket fluttered by in the breeze.
At one end of the street – the entrance to the market – stood a row of large, heavy concrete barriers, painted red and green and looking like giant Lego blocks. Locals pointed to a car-sized gap between two, through which the vehicle may have squeezed just after 7pm local time. The black SUV raced around 400m through the crowd, taking a sharp corner and leaving a trail of bodies.
At a press conference on Saturday, Magdeburg police chief Tom-Oliver Langhans said the first emergency call was logged at 7.02pm. “It all happened in the space of three minutes,” he said.
The driver appeared to have acted alone, he added, and may have rammed emergency vehicles deliberately to injure more people.
A handful of red candles and half a dozen bouquets had been left behind by locals by Saturday afternoon. Otherwise just confusion, silence and tears.
Watching the abandoned market from across the street on Saturday, local woman Nancy fought back tears in the fading light.
Her 42-year-old son was at the Christmas market, she says, and when the car appeared from nowhere he ducked in what turned out to be the right direction.
“During a football game on television we saw a ticker about an attack in Magdeburg and I called him immediately, around 7.15pm,” she said. “He answered, saying, ‘Mam, just be grateful you still have a son.’”
Gustav Schäfer, drummer with the popular German band Tokio Hotel, posted on Instagram that he and friends had been at the market minutes before the attack.
“We feel numb,” he wrote in his post. “Psychologically, it feels as if the world stood still for a moment. Thoughts are circling, heart heavy.”
As locals gathered for a memorial early on Saturday evening, Magdeburg’s fire brigade Daniel Schlürmann insisted “things like this don’t happen here”, hours after they did. How were his colleagues coping after last night?
“Their shifts,” he said, “were a heavy burden on the soul.”
On Saturday morning, chancellor Olaf Scholz visited the city, 140km southwest of Berlin. He spoke to relatives in clinics, thanked rescue crews and promised a “precise, accurate” investigation that would “leave nothing out”.
Battling tears, Scholz denounced what he called a “shocking act to injure and kill so many people with such brutality”.
During his visit, the death toll rose to five, with 200 more injured.
“Almost 40 are so seriously injured that one must be very worried about them,” added the chancellor. “We must – and we will – stand together.”
On Saturday, as some waited for news of their injured loved-ones, Magdeburgers at the crash scene struggled to keep up with the twists and turns of the story. An elderly woman in a black mohair hat, to nods from others, sighed: “You just can’t look inside a person’s head.”
The person in question has been identified only as Taleb Javad al A. According to the DPA news agency, he is a Saudi national and Shia Muslim from the eastern city of Al-Hofuf.
He came to Germany in 2006 on a trainee doctor visa. A decade later he filed an asylum application, the Bild tabloid reported, claiming his life was in danger following a death threat from a Saudi embassy staff member.
Six months after filing an asylum application, he was granted permanent residency.
In recent years he lived in Bernburg, 40km from Magdeburg, and worked there as a psychiatrist at a detox clinic.
Pictures from the crash scene on Friday night showed an heavyset man with a moustache, pinned to the ground with a confused expression. A drug test after his arrest came back positive, police said on Saturday morning, but gave no further details.
Amid early speculation of an Islamist motive, echoing the Berlin market attack eight years ago, Saturday morning brought a surprising twist.
Instead of ticking the boxes of a disgruntled Islamist, the perpetrator appeared to be the exact opposite: a radicalised, disgruntled anti-Islamist.
“Clearly the perpetrator was Islamophobic,” said Nancy Faeser, federal interior minister, in Magdeburg on Saturday.
And, judging from social media posts exhumed by German media organisations, the suspect was an enthusiastic supporter of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
In a series of posts he liked and repeated key AfD talking points on asylum and expressed praise for X owner Elon Musk. On Friday he praised the AfD as the only party capable of “saving Germany”.
After himself securing asylum, the 50-year-old suspect felt Germany was granting asylum to Islamist extremists and destroying Germany – and Europe.
To push back against what he saw as rising Islamist violence in Germany, Taleb Javad al A reportedly posted on August 13th to X that he was “prepared to pay any price for justice”.
“I promise you, if Germany wants war, it will have it,” he posted. “If Germany wants to kill us, we will slaughter it, die or go to prison, full of pride.”
Three months earlier, according to messages seen by Die Welt daily, he posted that “with 100 per cent certainty, revenge is coming. Germany will have to pay the price. A huge price”.
As a former asylum-seeking doctor, Taleb Javad al A gave an interview to the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine daily in 2019. He told the newspaper he had lost family members to radical Islamists – and that his own life had been threatened.
“That’s why I decided to apply for asylum in Germany, there was no point taking the risk of having to return and being killed,” he told the publication. After moving to Germany in 2006 he had turned his back on Islam but, to keep the peace, still occasionally attended prayers with friends or acquaintances.
“I went along and pretended to be Muslim,” he said, but dropped the charade after his asylum application was successful and he was granted permanent residency.
“My family hates me now,” he added. Muslim friends and acquaintances in Germany, he said, “showed neither understanding nor tolerance” to him.
“We lose our friends when we tell them that we have left Islam,” he said.
Amid growing isolation, he began making radical online posts, liking posts by AfD figures and others on the far right, in particular after a recent series of attacks in Germany involving violent asylum seekers. Weeks before the attack, he posted on X: “I am the most aggressive killer of Islam in history.”
Police said at a press conference on Saturday that they were still piecing together how an Egyptian born Muslim doctor, and vocal critic of Islamist violence, had planned and executed a Christmas market attack following an Islamist script.
As details of the attack filtered through, AfD leaders struggled to adapt their messaging. With 20 per cent support at national level, and 30 per cent in Saxony-Anhalt, the party hopes its hard line on immigration and asylum will chime with voters.
Minutes after the Friday attack, an AfD supporter posted on X: “Let me guess, the perpetrator was a Muslim.” Later, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel asked on the platform: “When will this madness end?”
On Saturday, Weidel insisted the perpetrator was not an AfD party member and had never applied for membership.
Citing a Saudi source, meanwhile, German news agency claimed Egypt had Taleb Javad al A on its radar and had warned Berlin three times about him in 2023 and 2024.
In an official statement issued through its foreign ministry, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia “affirms its position in rejecting violence” and expressed sympathies to survivors and families of the dead.
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