Its glühwein 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 this provincial German city into shock.
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.
“I’ve seen a lot of misery, many people who were searching. Many tears, bewilderment and extreme states of shock,” said Corinna Pagels, an emergency psychological counselor offering help to those affected.
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.
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.
This time, the suspect is very different.
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.
He is also an avowed atheist and anti-Islam, once describing himself in a 2019 newspaper interview as “the most aggressive critic of Islam in history.”
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’s soft line on immigration, as well as what he believed was Berlin’s overly cordial relationship with the Saudi regime.
Recent messages included threats. In August, Abdulmohsen said that if Germany “wants to kill us, we will slaughter them, die, or go to prison with pride.”
A constant in his feed was his anger at Islam. Germany, Abdulmohsen claimed, wanted “to Islamize Europe.”
But for many Germans in Magdeburg, the fact the latest Christmas market attacker doesn’t fit the expected security profile simply doesn’t matter.
“I think there should be a clean-up of people who do these things,” she added.
“Now is time to close our borders,” said a local man, Tom, standing nearby.
German politicians from opposite ends of the political spectrum have seized on the car-ramming to attack the coalition government.
Both share an opposition to mass migration: Far-left party leader Sahra Wagenknecht asked Interior Minister Nancy Faeser “why so many tips and warnings were ignored beforehand.”
Meanwhile the far-right AfD – which has made significant ground this year – is organizing a rally in Magdeburg on Monday evening, and the party’s parliamentary chief has demanded on X a special session be called to discuss security matters in the wake of the attack.
It seems this horrific and deadly Christmas market attack, despite allegedly being committed by a self-confessed Islamophobe, is fueling Germany’s angry anti-immigration mood.
