In the dark Magdeburg winter, police ribbons fluttered next to torn garlands in what, 24 hours earlier, had been a bustling place. Christmas walk.

In this paralyzed East German town of 240,000, people huddled in groups and stared in shock as a black SUV drove through a driveway of flashing lights and chatted, throwing bodies left and right.

“Afterwards, there was just a terrible, deadly silence,” said Philip, a 23-year-old rescuer, who was at the market with friends.

He was 2 meters away when the car sped by, just as he decided to go out to eat something: “If I had decided 10 seconds earlier, I would have been hit. People flew through the air.

Johannes Rörig arrived 10 minutes after the attack and witnessed a “horror scene”. His companion, three cabins away from the passing car, was at home and still in shock.

“I will never forget the traces of bodies, of people lying with limbs at strange angles,” Johannes said. “The first few minutes were just chaos, people were running and trying to help. »

The two young men began to provide first aid and Johannes saw a woman die while he was helping her.

( German Christmas market attack: five dead, including a child (9 years old), as details of alleged perpetrator emergeOpens in a new window )

On Saturday afternoon, police officers in black riot gear monitored a scene similar to an abandoned stage set, where empty pink bags of toasted almonds sat next to empty blue medical gloves.

A pile of red and gray wool military blankets lay in a crumpled heap under the candy-striped awning of an abandoned wooden cabin while a gold and silver thermal blanket fluttered 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 resembling giant Lego blocks. Residents pointed out a car-sized gap between two, through which the vehicle could have squeezed just after 7 p.m. local time. The black SUV drove about a quarter mile through the crowd, taking a sharp turn and leaving a trail of bodies.

At a press conference on Saturday, Magdeburg police chief Tom-Oliver Langhans said the first emergency call was recorded at 7:02 p.m. “It all happened in the space of three minutes,” he said.

The driver appears to have acted alone, he added, and may have deliberately rammed the emergency vehicles to injure more people.

A handful of red candles and half a dozen bouquets were left behind by residents on Saturday afternoon. Otherwise just confusion, silence and tears.

Looking at the abandoned market across the street Saturday, local resident Nancy held back tears in the fading light.

Her 42-year-old son was at the Christmas market, she said, and when the car appeared out of nowhere, he headed in what turned out to be the right direction.

“During a football match on TV we saw a ticker about an attack in Magdeburg and I called it immediately, around 7:15 p.m.,” she said. “He responded by saying, ‘Mom, just be grateful that you still have a son.'”

Gustav Schäfer, drummer for the popular German band Tokio Hotel, posted on Instagram that he and his friends were at the market minutes before the attack.

“We feel numb,” he wrote in his message. “Psychologically, it’s like the world has stopped for a moment. Thoughts go round and round, heart heavy.

As residents gathered early Saturday evening for a memorial ceremony, Magdeburg firefighter Daniel Schlürmann insisted that “things like this don’t happen here” hours later. How did his colleagues experience last night?

“Their shifts,” he said, “were a heavy burden on the soul. »

On Saturday morning, Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited the city located 140 km southwest of Berlin. He spoke with relatives in clinics, thanked the rescue teams and promised a “precise and accurate” investigation that “would leave nothing behind”.

Fighting back tears, Scholz denounced what he called a “shocking act to injure and kill so many people with such brutality.”

During his visit, the toll rose to five deaths and 200 additional injuries.

“Nearly 40 people are so seriously injured that we have to be very worried about them,” added the Chancellor. “We must – and we will – be united. »

On Saturday, while some were waiting for news of their injured loved ones, the Magdeburgers present at the scene of the accident had difficulty following the twists and turns of the story. An elderly woman wearing a black mohair hat, to the nods of others, sighed: “You just can’t look into a person’s head.” »

The person in question was identified only as Taleb Javad al A. According to the DPA news agency, he is a Saudi national and Shiite Muslim from the eastern town of Al-Hofuf.

He arrived in Germany in 2006 on a trainee doctor visa. A decade later, he applied for asylum, tabloid Bild reported, saying his life was in danger following death threats made by a Saudi embassy staff member.

Six months after filing for asylum, he was granted permanent residency.

In recent years he lived in Bernburg, 40 km from Magdeburg, and worked there as a psychiatrist in a drug treatment clinic.

Footage from the crash scene Friday evening showed a heavyset man with a mustache pinned to the ground with a confused expression. A drug test taken after his arrest came back positive, police said Saturday morning, without giving further details.

Amid early speculation of an Islamist motivation, echoing the Berlin market attack eight years ago, Saturday morning brought a surprising twist.

Instead of checking the boxes of a disgruntled Islamist, the author appeared to be the exact opposite: a radicalized, disgruntled anti-Islamist.

“It is clear that the perpetrator was Islamophobic,” Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said in Magdeburg on Saturday.

And, judging from social media posts unearthed by German media, the suspect was an enthusiastic supporter of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

In a series of posts, he liked and repeated the AfD’s main talking points on asylum and praised X owner Elon Musk. On Friday, he hailed the AfD as the only party capable of “saving Germany”.

After being granted asylum himself, the 50-year-old suspect believed that Germany was granting asylum to Islamist extremists and destroying Germany – and Europe.

To fight against what he considers to be a rise in Islamist violence in Germany, Taleb Javad al A published on August 13 on X that he was “ready to pay any price for justice”.

“I promise you, if Germany wants war, it will get it,” he posted. “If Germany wants to kill us, we will slaughter them, die or go to prison, full of pride.”

Three months earlier, according to messages seen by the daily Die Welt, he had declared that “with 100 percent 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 daily Frankfurter Allgemeine in 2019. He told the newspaper that he had lost family members to radical Islamists – and that his own life had been threatened.

“That’s why I decided to seek asylum in Germany, there was no point in taking the risk of having to return and being killed,” he told the newspaper. After moving to Germany in 2006, he had turned his back on Islam but, to keep the peace, he still occasionally attended prayers with friends or acquaintances.

“I went there and pretended to be Muslim,” he said, but abandoned the charade once his asylum application was accepted and he was granted residency. permed.

“My family hates me now,” he added. His Muslim friends and acquaintances in Germany, he said, “showed neither understanding nor tolerance” towards him.

“We lose our friends when we tell them we left Islam,” he said.

Amid increasing isolation, he began posting radical messages online, liking posts from AfD and other far-right figures, particularly after a recent series of attacks in Germany involving violent asylum seekers. A few weeks before the attack, he had posted on X: “I am the most aggressive killer of Islam in history. »

Police said at a news conference Saturday that they were still piecing together how an Egyptian-born Muslim doctor and outspoken critic of Islamist violence planned and carried out an attack on a Christmas market according to an Islamist scenario.

As details of the attack filtered out, AfD leaders struggled to adapt their message. With 20 percent support nationally and 30 percent in Saxony-Anhalt, the party hopes its hard line on immigration and asylum will please voters.

Minutes after Friday’s 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 that the attacker was not a member of the AfD and had never applied for membership.

Citing a Saudi source, the German news agency claimed that Egypt had Taleb Javad al A on its radar and had warned Berlin about him three times in 2023 and 2024.

In an official statement issued by its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia “affirms its position of rejection of violence” and expresses its sympathy to the survivors and families of the dead.