A dramatic footage has emerged from Germany, capturing the moments when police nabbed the suspect in the horrific car accident in Magdeburg city on Friday. The suspect was confronted by police officers after the accident. He was lying on the ground near a vehicle. The incident left five people dead and at least 200 injured.
Earlier, a car rammed into a busy outdoor Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg, killing at least two people and injuring at least 60 others. The authorities are calling it a deliberate attack. The driver was arrested shortly after the car barrelled into the market at around 7 pm when the number of holiday shoppers intensified, who were looking forward to the weekend.
Verified bystander footage distributed by the German news agency DPA showed the suspect’s arrest on a walkway in the middle of the road. A nearby police officer pointing a handgun at the man shouted at him as he lay prone. Other officers soon arrived to take the man into custody.
The two people confirmed dead were an adult and a toddler, but officials said additional deaths could not be ruled out because 15 people had been seriously injured.
The violence shocked the city, bringing its mayor to the verge of tears and marring a festive event that is part of a centuries-old German tradition.
The suspect is a 50-year-old Saudi doctor who moved to Germany in 2006, Tamara Zieschang, the interior minister for the state of Saxony-Anhalt, said at a news conference. He has been practising medicine in Bernburg, about 40 kilometres (25 miles) south of Magdeburg, she said.
“As things stand, he is a lone perpetrator, so that as far as we know, there is no further danger to the city,” Saxony-Anhalt’s governor, Reiner Haseloff, told reporters.
“Every human life that has fallen victim to this attack is a terrible tragedy and one human life too many.”
The violence occurred in Magdeburg, a city of about 240,000 people west of Berlin that serves as Saxony-Anhalt’s capital. Friday’s attack came eight years after an Islamic extremist drove a truck into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin, killing 13 people and injuring many others. The attacker was killed days later in a shootout in Italy.
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.
(With agency inputs)
