At least four people were killed and more than 200 others injured after a driver rammed an SUV into a crowded Christmas market in eastern Germany.
German authorities on Saturday were searching for a motive that they said led a driver to plow an SUV into a crowd at a Christmas market set up in a narrow alley in the eastern city of Magdeburg on Friday evening, killing at least four people and injuring more than 200 others.
Memorials were planned for Saturday, and Chancellor Olaf Scholz was expected to visit the site of the attack, which came as many Germans were marking the start of the Christmas holiday after a year of gloomy news about a slowing economy and the collapse of the German government.
The authorities said the driver of the SUV was a 50-year-old citizen of Saudi Arabia who had lived in Germany for decades on a visa that granted him permanent residency. The news provided more fuel for the polarizing debates over uncontrolled immigration that have swept Germany in recent years and as the country faces snap elections in February.
Of the people injured, 41 were severely hurt, the police in Magdeburg said. The authorities said that they believed the attack was deliberate, but that the driver acted alone.
The police searched an apartment in a town 25 miles south of Magdeburg where the doctor was reported to have lived and worked as a psychotherapist. The man first came to Germany in 2006, the authorities said.
The doctor’s full identity has not been released, said a security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
In Magdeburg, a line of large concrete blocks painted red and green had been placed at the entrance to the Christmas market, which was set up in narrow streets holding wooden stalls decorated with twinkling lights and selling hot mulled wine, sausages and gifts. But the driver appeared to have taken advantage of a gap along a tramline to plow into the crowd.
“It is not 100 percent possible to protect such events,” said Andreas Rosskopf, the head of the federal police union. Knives were banned this year at holiday markets across the country, after an armed man killed three people at a street festival in August.
Magdeburg, which has a population of about 240,000, was part of Communist East Germany, and the annual market is set up in the center of the city, in the old market square in front of City Hall.
Surveillance footage circulating on social media and verified by The New York Times on Friday shows a car plowing into a large crowd at the market shortly after 7 p.m. The car then turns right onto another crowded street. Video of the aftermath shows people helping the wounded as cries are heard.
A couple who were at the market during the attack told a German television station that a black SUV suddenly careened into an alley packed with people who had come to celebrate the start of the last weekend before Christmas. The car drove some 1,200 feet before it stopped, officials said.
“It all happened so quickly,” the couple said
Immediately after the attack on Friday, emergency medical workers set up tents along the main road beside the market where they treated the injured who were later taken to the city’s main medical clinic. Others were flown to hospitals in nearby cities.
