Its gl\u00fchwein stalls, festooned with Christmas lights and tinsel, stand emptied and shuttered. <\/p>\n
The horrific car-ramming attack on this Christmas market on Friday night left at least five people dead, including a 9-year-old boy, plunging this provincial German city into shock. <\/p>\n
At the entrance to the market, grieving locals have lit candles and laid flowers to pay their respects, many feeling a profound sense of loss. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve seen a lot of misery, many people who were searching. Many tears, bewilderment and extreme states of shock,\u201d said Corinna Pagels, an emergency psychological counselor offering help to those affected. <\/p>\n
Amid the grief, the attack has revived memories in Germany of a similar assault in 2016, when more than a dozen people were mowed down and killed at a Christmas market in Berlin. <\/p>\n
Back then, it was a 24-year-old Tunisian man, who had failed to gain asylum in Germany and pledged allegiance to the radical jihadists of ISIS, who plowed a truck through the festive crowd, fueling anger and suspicion across Germany towards a recent influx of mainly Muslim immigrants from the Middle East. <\/p>\n
This time, the suspect is very different. <\/p>\n
Taleb Al Abdulmohsen, 50, was originally from Saudi Arabia, but had lived in Germany since 2006, working as a consultant psychiatric doctor in a local clinic. <\/p>\n
He is also an avowed atheist and anti-Islam, once describing himself in a 2019 newspaper interview as \u201cthe most aggressive critic of Islam in history.\u201d <\/p>\n
On social media, Abdulmohsen expressed support for the German anti-immigration AfD party and repeated his own frustrations with what he saw as the German government\u2019s soft line on immigration, as well as what he believed was Berlin\u2019s overly cordial relationship with the Saudi regime. <\/p>\n
Recent messages included threats. In August, Abdulmohsen said that if Germany \u201cwants to kill us, we will slaughter them, die, or go to prison with pride.\u201d <\/p>\n
A constant in his feed was his anger at Islam. Germany, Abdulmohsen claimed, wanted \u201cto Islamize Europe.\u201d <\/p>\n
But for many Germans in Magdeburg, the fact the latest Christmas market attacker doesn\u2019t fit the expected security profile simply doesn\u2019t matter. <\/strong> <\/p>\n \u201cI think there should be a clean-up of people who do these things,\u201d she added. <\/p>\n \u201cNow is time to close our borders,\u201d said a local man, Tom, standing nearby. <\/p>\n German politicians from opposite ends of the political spectrum have seized on the car-ramming to attack the coalition government. <\/p>\n Both share an opposition to mass migration: Far-left party leader Sahra Wagenknecht asked Interior Minister Nancy Faeser \u201cwhy so many tips and warnings were ignored beforehand.\u201d <\/p>\n Meanwhile the far-right AfD \u2013 which has made significant ground this year \u2013 is organizing a rally in Magdeburg on Monday evening, and the party\u2019s parliamentary chief has demanded on X a special session be called to discuss security matters in the wake of the attack. <\/p>\n It seems this horrific and deadly Christmas market attack, despite allegedly being committed by a self-confessed Islamophobe, is fueling Germany\u2019s angry anti-immigration mood. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Its gl\u00fchwein stalls, festooned with Christmas lights and tinsel, stand emptied and shuttered. The horrific car-ramming attack on this Christmas market on Friday night left at least five people dead, including a 9-year-old boy, plunging…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1821,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1820\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}