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A car drove into a group of people at a Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg on Friday evening, causing multiple casualties in what local officials said they suspected was a deliberate attack.
The German broadcaster MDR said that at least one person had been killed and several injured in the incident in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. Eyewitnesses told the broadcaster that the car drove straight into a crowd.
Police arrested a person in connection with the incident, according to the German press agency DPA.
A spokesperson for the Saxony-Anhalt regional government told the agency that it was “probably an attack”.
“This is a terrible event, particularly now in the days before Christmas,” the state’s prime minister, Reiner Haseloff, said.
The incident comes almost eight years to the day since 12 people were killed and 49 injured in 2016, when a 24-year-old Tunisian failed asylum seeker drove into a Christmas market in Berlin. A 13th victim of the attack, which was claimed by the jihadist group Isis, died in 2021.
German federal interior minister Nancy Faeser recently called for vigilance when visiting Christmas markets. Speaking at the end of November, she said that there was no concrete evidence of an immediate threat, but she added: “Given the high level of threat in the abstract, we still have reason to be very vigilant and to act consistently for our security.”
The incident comes as Germany gears up for early elections in February, in which migration and law and order are set to feature strongly. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is currently polling in second place.
The party secured a historic first place finish in regional elections in the state of Thuringia earlier this year, and finished second in two other eastern German states. The votes took place shortly after a terror attack in August in the town of Solingen, when a Syrian national suspected of being a member of Isis fatally stabbed three people and injured eight others.