German Christmas market assault – newest: Nine-year-old boy killed is called as 1000’s raised on GoFundMe

Christmas markets are a huge part of German culture as an annual holiday tradition cherished since the Middle Ages and successfully exported to much of the Western world.

In Berlin alone, more than 100 markets opened late last month and brought the smells of mulled wine, roasted almonds and bratwurst to the capital.

Other markets abound across the country.

Andrea Reis, who had been at the market on Friday, returned on Saturday with her daughter Julia to lay a candle by the church overlooking the site. She said that had it not been for a matter of moments, they may have been in the car’s path.

“I said, ‘let’s go and get a sausage’, but my daughter said ‘no let’s keep walking around’. If we’d stayed where we were we’d have been in the car’s path,” she said.

Tears ran down her face as she described the scene. “Children screaming, crying for mama. You can’t forget that,” she said.

One of the UK’s biggest Christmas markets said it has reviewed its security processes in the wake of the attack on a German Christmas market which left five people dead and more than 200 injured.

Birmingham’s Frankfurt Christmas Market’s security processes were reviewed and discussed with a police security adviser after a BMW ploughed into customers at the busy festive market in Magdeburg on Friday evening.

It said no changes are required and all staff remain vigilant.

Thi Linh Chi Nguyen, a manicurist from Vietnam whose salon is situated close to the Christmas market, was on the phone during a break when she heard loud bangs that she thought were fireworks.

She then saw a car drive through the market at high speed. People screamed and a child was thrown into the air by the car.

Shaking as she described what she had witnessed, the 34-year-old recalled seeing the car bursting out of the market and turning right onto Ernst-Reuter-Allee street and then coming to a standstill at the tram stop where the suspect was arrested.

“My husband and I helped [those injured] for two hours,” she told the Associated Press. “He ran back home and grabbed as many blankets as he could find because they didn’t have enough to cover the injured people. And it was so cold.”

Earlier this week, Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner Jon Savell said police are “relying on the public” to spot suspected terror activity during the festive period, as this year has seen a 50 per cent rise in suspicious activity reports made to the anti-terror hotline.

The cause of the spike is uncertain but contacts are making a difference to investigations, according to Counter Terrorism Policing (CTP).

There were 52 more arrests for terrorism offences last year than in 2022 – an increase of 31 per cent and the highest number in a single year since 2019.

Christmas shopping, festive markets, pantomimes and concerts could attract terror activity, CTP warned, as it reminded people “everyone has a role to play in keeping each other safe” by spotting and reporting suspicious activity.

CTP previously said it had more than 800 investigations under way, most in partnership with MI5, and that it was working with intelligence services at MI5 and GCHQ to understand and prevent radicalisation.

It has stopped 43 late-stage attacks from taking place alongside MI5, three of which were in the last 12 months.

The suspect is a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia, named by German media as Taleb al-Abdulmohsen. On Saturday evening, he was remanded into custody after appearing in court.

Authorities confirmed that he first came to Germany in 2006 and later gained refugee status in 2016.

Local media reported that he had shown support for the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD), with a Saudi source telling Reuters that the kingdom had warned German authorities about the attacker, who the source said had posted extremist views on his personal X account.

A German security source told the news agency that tips sent by the Saudi authorities in 2023 and 2024 had been passed on to the relevant authorities. Newspaper Die Welt cited security sources as saying that a risk assessment conducted by state and federal investigators concluded that the man posed “no specific danger”.

My colleague Athena Stavrou has more details in this report:

The confounding picture of Taleb A. makes his aims while behind the wheel on Friday night all the more muddy. But for too many people and politicians, the identity of the perpetrator as an Arab will be enough, Mark Almond writes:

The clinic where the suspect is believed to have worked released a statement following Friday night’s attack.

Posting on Instagram, the Salus-Fachklinikum Bernburg clinic said it was “shocked to learn that the alleged perpetrator worked as a specialist doctor in our enforcement in Bernburg”.

It added that the suspect had been employed there as a psychiatric specialist since March 2020, but he had not been working since October due to illness and holiday.

“We have been supporting the work of the investigative authorities in every possible way since the late hours,” it added.

Germany’s foreign minister Annalena Baerbock has stressed that Christmas markets should continue to be “places of solidarity and togetherness in society”, in comments to the dpa press agency.

The attack at Magdeburg has prompted several other towns to cancel their weekend Christmas markets as a precaution and out of solidarity. Berlin – which suffered a 2016 attack at a church market in which 12 people were killed and 49 injured – kept its markets open but increased the police presence.