The alleged perpetrator of the deadly car-ramming attack on a Christmas market last week in Germany had been contacted by police just weeks before the incident, authorities said on Monday, as the number of people injured climbed to 235.
The attack in the central city of Magdeburg on Friday evening, which killed five people including a 9-year-old boy, is believed to have been carried out by a Saudi national identified only as Taleb A according to German privacy laws.
The suspect has been living in Germany since 2006 and was granted political refugee status in 2016. He was most recently working as a doctor in the town of Bernburg, south of Magdeburg.
Taleb A was detained at the scene and is being held in police custody, with investigators searching for a motive amid suggestions that authorities failed to heed warnings about the man.
On Monday, Tamara Zieschang, the interior minister of the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, told lawmakers in Magdeburg that police met the man twice – in September 2023 and October 2024 – to warn him about his behaviour.
Meanwhile, the Interior Ministry of the northern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern said that Taleb A became known to authorities as a potential suspect in 2015.
Regional authorities had informed the Federal Criminal Police Office at the Joint Counter-Terrorism Centre, which is supported by Germany’s federal and regional government, about the man’s possible intention to carry out an attack on February 6, 2015, it said.
The report concerned threats to carry out actions that would attract international attention against a medical association in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in April 2013 and one year later against a local authority in the northern German city of Stralsund.
The Mecklenburg-Vorpommern interior minister, Christian Pegel, said the 50-year-old suspect had lived in the state from 2011-16 and had completed parts of his specialist medical training in Stralsund.
He said the man had been involved in a dispute with the medical association about the recognition of examination results and had later threatened the social services in Stralsund in an attempt to obtain assistance with living costs.
A district court fined Taleb A for threatening the medical association, Pegel said.
However, he added, the previous investigations had not revealed any evidence of real preparations for an attack or Islamist connections.
The man was warned by the police and told that he would be monitored more closely, but was not classified as a threat, Pegel said.
