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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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
A district court fined Taleb A for threatening the medical association, Pegel said.<\/p>\n
However, he added, the previous investigations had not revealed any evidence of real preparations for an attack or Islamist connections.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n