Here in the Christmas season, it’s a time of peace and hope. People scurry about to buy gifts for their loved ones, eager to see their faces light up on Christmas morning–or Christmas Eve night. I’m not one to judge–and celebrating the holiday season with friends and family.
Sure, not everyone celebrates it, but as they celebrate things we don’t, usually folks just leave one another alone on that front.
Unfortunately, this Christmas in Germany will be a dark one for far too many families after a terrorist attack.
A car plowed into a crowd of people shopping at a busy Christmas market in eastern Germany Friday — killing at least two, including a small child, in what officials are saying was a terrorist attack by a Saudi doctor.
Horrifying video showed the driver ripping through the narrow pathways between the outdoor shopping village stalls shortly after 7 p.m. local time in the city of Magdeburg, where hundreds of people were gathered.
The driver was immediately arrested after carrying out what authorities are calling a terror attack, German news agency dpa reported.
The suspect is a 50-year-old Saudi doctor who first came to Germany in 2006, Saxony-Anhalt’s interior minister, Tamara Zieschang said.
He had been practicing medicine in Bernburg, about 23 miles south of Magdeburg.
“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, also told reporters.
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Sixty-eight others were injured in the mayhem, including 15 who were hurt very seriously. Another 37 people had injuries of medium severity and 16 were lightly injured.
Authorities are investigating the incident as a suspected targeted attack, according to regional government spokesperson Matthias Schuppe and city spokesperson Michael Reif.
“This is a terrible event, particularly now in the days before Christmas,” Haseloff said, adding that flags will be lowered to half-staff in Saxony-Anhalt and in federal buildings across the country in mourning.
This just happened a few hours ago, so it’s unfortunately possible that the death toll will climb.
I pray that it doesn’t, but, well, not all prayers get answered the way we want them to.
Now, about the alleged perpetrator. It seems that he wasn’t on anyone’s radar as an Islamist. Unlike mass causality attacks here, he wasn’t on anyone’s radar.
This is far from the first terrorist attack in Germany. It’s not even the first this year. In September, a terrorist fired shots at the Israeli consulate on the anniversary of the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes during the Olympic games. In August, three people were killed by a Syrian man during a mass stabbing at a festival in Solingen.
That’s three attacks in just the last few months of the year.
No, these were not mass shootings–the one incident involving a gun only resulted in the shooter being killed, after all–but they’re what would be called mass shootings here if a gun had been used. Only one hadn’t been necessary in either of these cases.
But I will add that it might have been useful if someone in the crowd had been armed.
You can’t snap a towel at someone behind the wheel of a car. Even a discretely carried knife won’t do anything in such a situation. A gun would.
That’s not an option for most people in Germany.
Read the full article here