Sadness and anger in Magdeburg after Christmas market attack

Magdeburg’s Christmas market is a sad sight. This should have been the busiest weekend of the season, but the whole area has been cordoned off and all the stands are shut.

Police are the only people walking around the boarded-up mulled wine and gingerbread stalls.

On the pavement, red candles flicker, tributes laid for the victims.

Lukas, a truck driver, told me he felt compelled to come to pay his respects. “I wasn’t there when it happened,” he told me.

“But I work here in Magdeburg. I’m here every day. I’ve driven by here a thousand times.”

“It’s a tragedy for everyone here in Magdeburg. The perpetrator should be punished.”

“We can only hope that the victims and their families find the strength to deal with it.”

There is sorrow here – but there is anger too.

Many people here see this attack as a terrible lapse in security. That is a claim the authorities reject, although they have admitted the attacker entered the market using a route planned for emergency responders.

Michael, who also came to pay tributes to the victims, said “there should’ve been better security”.

“We should have been prepared better but that was not done properly.”

Standing at the security cordon, I heard a group of locals complaining loudly about Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz and regional politicians.

“They are wasting our tax money, they are just looking out for themselves. They are not interested in us. We just hear empty promises,” one man said.

“They are turning what happened here around and want to put the blame on the opposition and use it for their election campaign,” he said.

On Saturday evening, around the same time as the square in front of Magdeburg’s Gothic cathedral was filled with mourners watching a memorial service, a demonstration took place nearby.

Protesters held a banner that read “Remigration now!” – a concept popular among the far-right – and shouted “those who do not love Germany should leave Germany”.

It is not clear yet what impact this attack may have on Germany’s upcoming election.

Germany has been hit by a number of deadly Islamist attacks in the past, but investigators said the evidence they have gathered so far suggests a different picture in this case.

Germany’s Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said the suspect appears to have been “Islamophobic”.

The suspect, Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen, is from Saudi Arabia, and his social media posts suggest he had been critical of Islam.

He also expressed sympathy on social media for Germany’s far-right political party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), re-tweeting posts from the party’s leader and a far-right activist.