Car-ramming attack on X-mas market 5 killed, hundreds injured in Germany

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz yesterday condemned the “terrible, insane” car-ramming attack on a crowded Christmas market that killed five people and injured more than 200.

Police arrested a 50-year-old Saudi psychiatry doctor at the scene Friday, next to the battered SUV that had ploughed through the festive crowd leaving a trail of carnage and bloodied casualties.

A sombre Scholz, dressed in black, visited the attack site yesterday with national and regional politicians in the eastern city of Magdeburg, where they laid flowers outside the main church.

Scholz said at least 40 of the injured were in a condition that people should be “worried” about them but gave no details.

He pledged that Germany would respond “with the full force of the law” to the attack. But he also called for unity in the country that has been plunged into a heated debate on immigration and security ahead of elections in February.

As Germany reeled in shock from an attack that came eight years after a jihadist strike on a Berlin Christmas market claimed 13 lives, more details emerged about the Saudi man under arrest.

Taleb Jawad Al Abdulmohsen had lived in Germany since 2006 and held a permanent residence permit, working in a clinic near Magdeburg.

He had also worked as a rights activist who supported Saudi women and described himself as a “Saudi atheist”. He had voiced strongly anti-Islam views, echoing the rhetoric of the far-right in social media posts and interviews.

As his views expressed online grew more radical, he accused Germany’s  government of a plan to “Islamise Europe” and voiced fears he was being targeted by authorities.

The Bild daily said an initial drug test had proved positive when police used a test kit that can detect narcotics including cannabis, cocaine and methamphetamines. This was not immediately confirmed by authorities.