German Christmas market attack: Ramming car drives into crowd eight years after Berlin tragedy

On December 20, 2024, a car plowed into the Christmas market in the city of Magdeburg, Germany. The exact number of victims is not yet known, but between 60 and 80 people were injured. Some local press reports mention around ten deaths. The city hall confirmed one. Eight years ago, twelve people were killed in similar circumstances in Berlin.

A car plowed into a crowd at a Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg on Friday, injuring more than 60 people, local authorities said, suspecting a “attack,” just eight years after a similar attack in Berlin.

Man arrested

A suspect was arrested near the market, police later announced. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said the events in the city suggested the worst was to come.

Between “60 and 80 people” were injured, several of them “seriously”, the police said. 'AFP the emergency services of this city in northern Germany, located in the regional state of Saxony-Anhalt.

The regional interior ministry has also indicated to AFP that he assumed that it was an “attack”.

“This is a terrible event, in the days before Christmas,” Saxony-Anhalt's Prime Minister Reiner Haseloff told public television channel MDR.

According to emergency services, several of the injured are “seriously” as a result of the incident involving “a car.” Some media reports have reported several deaths, but authorities have not immediately confirmed this.

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Police in the city of around 250,000, the capital of the state of Saxony-Anhalt, are speaking of a “major intervention” underway at the market Christmas, according to a message on X.

Call for vigilance

The NTV television channel showed numerous ambulances and fire trucks on the site, injured people being rushed to hospitals and rescue workers setting up aid devices for victims.

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser had recently called on the population to be vigilant at Christmas markets, without mentioning any specific threats.

Christmas markets are an “ideologically appropriate target for people motivated by Islamism,” intelligence services had recently warned.

Berlin precedent

Germany has experienced a bloody attack in truck attack on a Christmas market in December 2016, claimed by the Islamic State group (IS), which left 12 dead in the center of Berlin and more than 60 injured.

Several attacks or planned attacks with Islamist motivations, and involving foreign nationals, have shocked the country in recent months.

At the end of August, a knife attack committed by a Syrian and claimed by IS left three dead and several injured at a party in Solingen (west).

In June, another knife attack, attributed to an Afghan at an anti-Islam rally in Mannheim, left one dead, a police officer who had intervened.

In September, a 27-year-old Syrian suspected of links to radical Islam was arrested for planning a machete attack targeting German soldiers in a town in Bavaria.

And recently, three young jihadists suspected of preparing an attack were arrested in southwest Germany, the federal prosecutor's office and the police announced on Tuesday.

Among them, two German-Lebanese brothers, aged 15 and 20, are suspected of having “concretely prepared an attack” motivated by a “deep sympathy for the terrorist group Islamic State” (IS), these sources indicate in a press release.

Since the unprecedented attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas against Israel on October 7, 2023, which triggered the war In the Gaza Strip, the German authorities have increased their vigilance in the face of the Islamist threat and the resurgence of anti-Semitism, like many countries in the world.