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German police arrested a Saudi Arabian man after a deadly car-ramming attack on a Christmas market Friday in which an SUV barrelled through a crowd of revellers at high speed, leaving a trail of bloody carnage.
At least two people were killed, one of them a young child, and 68 injured, said authorities in the city of Magdeburg, located about 130 kilometres (80 miles) southwest of Berlin.
The suspect was a 50-year-old medical doctor from Saudi Arabia living in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, said regional premier Reiner Haseloff, speaking at a scene cordoned off and guarded by police commandos. “We have arrested the perpetrator, a man from Saudi Arabia, a doctor who has been in Germany since 2006,” he told reporters, calling the attack a “catastrophe” for the city and the country. “From what we currently know he was a lone attacker so we don’t think there is any further danger.”
German media partially named the suspect as Taleb A. and said he was a doctor of psychiatry.
The black BMW barrelled through the crowd at high speed just after 7:00 pm local time (1800 GMT) when the market was filled with revellers.
Police said the vehicle drove “at least 400 metres across the Christmas market” leaving a trail of bloodied casualties, debris and broken glass at the city’s central town hall square. Ambulances and fire engines rushed to the chaotic site, which was doused in blue police lights and wailing sirens, as badly injured people were treated on site and rushed off to hospitals.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier wrote that “the anticipation of a peaceful Christmas was suddenly interrupted” in the attack but he cautioned that “the background to the terrible deed has yet been clarified”. The leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), Alice Weidel, which has focused on jihadist attacks in its campaign against immigrants, wrote on X “when will this madness stop?” The Saudi government expressed “solidarity with the German people and the families of the victims”, in a statement on social media platform X, and “affirmed its rejection of violence”. French President Emmanuel Macron said he was “profoundly shocked” by the attack and that he “shares the pain of the German people”. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni also condemned the “brutal attack on the defenceless crowd” and Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez voiced his sorrow at the “terrible attack”.
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Apparently, he was an open supporter of the AfD, so I don’t know about him being a jihadist
A lot of muslems, ironic enought, support the AfD
The guy was extremely anti Islam and praised Israel and every far right anti Islam politicians. This is the opposite of a jihadist.
But he is brown so whatever we can be super racist.
Probably a case of fuck you, got mine attitude.
I mean fuck cars but this was not an infrastructure issue here lol
Car attacks on Christmas markets are a well known threat in Germany and most Christmas markets have some form of security infrastructure like concrete blocks or armed police by now. Concrete blocks only work if they are interconnected, otherwise they have little to no stopping effect.
Private cars, that can hide attackers, have no business anywhere near urban cores, pedestrianised zones or Christmas markets.
Every pedestrianized area should have bollards or another devices preventing cars from entering the area, this can prevent violent attacks like this as well as drunk driving incidents.
Or attackers can start going after executives like Luigi. Win win
Revolutions tend to eat their children or something like that. Keeping an attack surface like that open for the sole purpose of scaring the ruling or owning classes is inefficient in the trauma economy of change. Luigi was so effective because the targeting was bullseye - almost no one else symbolises what is wrong with US healthcare like the existence of healthcare insurance CEOs. Christmas markets and private cars on the other hand are infrastructure used by millions. Luigi did not go amok in a hospital, he chose one of those targets most responsible for his suffering.
Preventing cars from being used as weapons is an infrastructure issue.
After the 2017 attacks in Stockholm, the street where the attack happened now has proud concrete lions ensuring that a future attack of that kind will be more than likely to fail. These lions are infrastructure.
Not every member of the fuck cars community is about car infrastructure, even though I personally fall into the infrastructure camp.
Say you have the viewpoint that guns should be tightly controlled due to the number of people killed by them. Cars kill approximately the same number of people in the US every year (depending on if you count suicides and if intent is important). If guns are bad for deadly external behaviors, then so are cars. Just like how there are gun ranges or race tracks for responsible ownership, there can be gun related murder and car related murder. Ban guns and ban cars.
Case in point is this very article. It appears to be a hate related crime committed with a car. Germany tightly controls gun ownership, so why would we dismiss tight control of car ownership? Should we allow this person to drive again if he’s convicted? Why do we allow DUI drivers, who have killed others before, to continue to drive again? What do devices like ignition interlocks say about us?
Not every member of the fuck cars community is about car infrastructure, even though I personally fall into the infrastructure camp.
If they’re not, they’re confused because that’s squarely what the entire movement is about.
Are they? I’ve seen plenty of well-liked memes of banning cars as well as guns. There are popular posts about banning cars entirely from various developments. Or outright hate and venting when another ghost bike gets installed.
IMHO, the urbanist movement is more focused on infrastructure than fuck cars. Fuck cars is more encompassing than just urbanism and civil engineering.
The use of cars as intentional, or drunk/careless, murder weapons is a genuine anti-car issue. That most killings with cars get very low punishment, especially with a claim of carelessness/innattentiveness, makes it easy to cover up murder, and a “fuck cars” issue.
A middle aged psychiatrist???
My fucking question exactly. What the actual fuck??
Recently it has been more and more people like this. Men with family that have no social or financial problems, that have been here for years, suddenly want to kill a bunch of people. Its easy to explain when its people that recently escaped wars and shit, but if it seemingly randomly happens after 18 years then its odd.
These are not the actions of a sane person.
This was terrible, and the obligatory “fuck cars,” but are they sure it was an intentional jihadist attack?
I remember this :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Monica_Farmers_Market_crash
the guy claimed he mistook the gas for the brake, for 10 whole seconds of carnage and destruction. Got believed too, because old geezer. This one is a middle aged psychiatrist but a stroke or too much of his own medicine are just the first possible reasons I can imagine.
According to German media, the guy came from Saudi Arabia in 2006, but is “ex-muslim”, “anti islamic” and supporter of German far right party AfD, some years ago he tweeted that he will take “revenge” for the treatment of Saudis seeking asylum in Germany. Thus, it is concluded that his motives were not djihadist.
Sources:
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/magdeburg-faq-100.html (in German):
The arrested man is known as an activist critical of Islam who describes himself as an ex-Muslim. In social media, on Islamophobic websites and in interviews, he recently levelled accusations against the German authorities. Among other things, he accused them of not doing enough to combat Islamism and feared the Islamisation of Germany.
On the online service X, he expressed his sympathy for the AfD and dreamed of a joint project with the far-right party: an academy for ex-Muslims.
After going public years ago with his support for Saudi women fleeing their home country, he later wrote on his website in English and Arabic: “My advice: don’t ask for asylum in Germany.” According to the Reuters news agency, an insider from Saudi Arabia said that Saudi Arabia had warned the German authorities about the attacker.
More and more information is now known about the alleged perpetrator. According to MDR information, the man wrote around a year ago in a now deleted post on the platform “X” that the German state was persecuting refugees from Saudi Arabia in order to destroy their lives. He is said to have announced “imminent revenge”, the newspaper “Welt” reported on Friday.
Thank you for the information! I guess the answer to Weldt’s “when will this madness stop?” is “when you stop whipping your far-rightists into a murderous frenzy.”
Dude lives in Germany for nearly 20 years, but is still stated as “from Saudi Arabia”.
Another car used as a weapon, but politicians will still turn a blind eye to it!
Article and summary don’t seem to include that he was an ex-muslim, anti-muslim, AfD supporter, and instead compared it to a past jihadist attack.
So it was religiously motivated attack against unarmed people that were in the perpetrators out-group.
That fits with what is called a ‘lesser jihad’ afaik.
Also fits with being a fucking Nazi
It is terrorism, and ethnic supremacist terrorism.
Jihad is a muslim/arabic word that means “muslim holy” war/violence. Islamophobic crusader/zionist supremacist violence would not use the word jihad to describe each other. LIke 9/11, KSA and Israeli agents providing a jihadist narrative was a tool for anti-muslim wars. Making this an AfD agenda item, rather than an anti-AfD item is a preferred media narrative of OP.
