Six people died and more than 300 were injured when a Saudi-born doctor drove a car into a Christmas market in the city of Magdeburg in December.
A car-ramming attack on a Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg — which left six people dead shortly before Christmas — will not be investigated as a terrorist attack, the country’s Federal Prosecutor General Jens Rommel told regional channel SWR.
Rommel said the perpetrator of the attack, a Saudi-born doctor who described himself as an ex-Muslim, likely carried out the rampage “out of personal frustration” and didn’t target state institutions.
Rommel said that, unlike a fatal knife attack in the city of Solingen, the suspect was not tied to any specific organisation, such as the so-called Islamic State group, which claimed responsibility for the stabbing at a festival in August last year.
As a result, the incident will likely be investigated by Germany’s state prosecutors rather than the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, which deals with acts of terrorism.
“We need a specific state security background. That means we need an attack on the state as a whole or on our constitutional principles,” Rommel said. He added that the attack was also directed toward the Christmas market as such.
Authorities warned shortly after the attack unfolded not to make assumptions about the suspect’s motivations, saying that he had a complex profile that was atypical of those who had carried out such attacks in Germany in the past.
The suspect, identified by local media as Taleb A, declared he had renounced Islam and ran a website allegedly helping former Muslims flee prosecution in their homelands. He also expressed sympathies for Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and its anti-immigration policies.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, Germany’s Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said it was clear that the suspect held “Islamophobic” views but added it was too early to draw a link between his views and a motivation for the attack.
German authorities came under fire after it emerged that the suspect had been the subject of numerous tip-offs over the years since as early as 2013, including several from the Saudi government. Police in the state of Saxony-Anhalt concluded any threat of violence was “too unspecific” after an investigation.
Germany’s Justice Minister Volker Wissing told Funke media group that, despite investigations into the suspect’s threatening comments, his political statements were “so confused that none of the security authorities’ patterns fitted him.”
The investigation into the perpetrator will continue in Saxony-Anhalt.
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