Berlin, Dec 21 (EFE).- The death toll from a ramming car attack at a Christmas market in Magdeburg in eastern climbed to five in the last few hours.
Describing the incident that occurred on Friday evening as an “insane attack,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz urged Germans to remain united and not allow hatred to divide them.
“There is no place more peaceful, more joyous in than a Christmas market. What a terrible attack this was that injured so many people, killed people. We have since found out that there are over 200 people who were injured by the attack and five have died. Nearly 40 are critically injured,” said Scholz in a brief appearance at the scene alongside the premier of the federal state of Saxony-Anhalt, Reiner Hasseloff, on Saturday.
“We must stand together..in the aftermath,” he added.
Both Scholz and Hasseloff said that everything must be done to investigate what happened and apply the full weight of the law on the perpetrator.
They also offered help to those affected and to those who participated in the emergency efforts after the incident.
“I want to say thank you to all the first responders, the emergency services, the volunteers, who stopped things (from) getting worse. My solidarity is with the victims and their families and the city of Magdeburg,” Scholz said.
The alleged perpetrator is a 50-year-old Saudi doctor, identified as Taleb A, who in the past had gained some notoriety as a critic of Islam.
Taleb A came to in 2006 as a student and was granted asylum in July 2016 after receiving death threats for having turned away from Islam.
He lived and worked as a psychiatrist in Bernburg, a small town of 32,000 inhabitants on the banks of the Saale river between Magdeburg and Halle.
As an activist, he informed and advised Saudi women about the possibilities of fleeing their country and had a website with information on the German asylum system.
In an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper in 2009, he said that many Saudi women came to him for protection after being raped by the men they depended on.
In that interview, he said that the German asylum system was a path to freedom for these women.
In another interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper published in 2009, he described himself as the greatest critic of Islam in history.
From a certain point on, his distance from Islam turned into an open rejection of German immigration policy.
In November, he posted a message on his X with four demands of the Saudi opposition and said that had to protect its borders from illegal immigration.
He then accused former Chancellor Angela Merkel of having had a plan to Islamize Europe with her open borders policy.
Just a week ago, an interview with him was published on an Islamophobic b the US in which he claimed that the German state had a secret operation to persecute ex-Muslims from Saudi Arabia around the world and at the same time granted asylum to Syrian jihadists. EFE
rz/pd
