A judge on Sunday ordered a man suspected of killing five people by driving a car into a crowd at a Christmas market in Germany to remain in detention as the authorities worked to understand the motives behind an attack that has stunned the country.
The victims in the assault on the market, which took place in the eastern city of Magdeburg on Friday night, were a 9-year-old boy and four women aged 45 to 75, the Magdeburg police said in a statement on Sunday.
More than 200 others were wounded, 41 of them seriously, in the attack that shattered the peace of Germany’s Christmas season, which is celebrated in hundreds of outdoor markets round the country.
The suspect, identified as Taleb A. in keeping with German privacy laws, was questioned on Saturday, security officials said. The authorities have described him as a 50-year-old Saudi doctor who had been living in Germany for nearly two decades.
Officials said that they were still trying to understand why the attacker had decided to rent the car, an S.U.V., and drive it into the crowded Christmas market in an old square in front of Magdeburg’s city hall.
Holger Munch, head of Germany’s domestic security agency, the Federal Criminal Office, said that the authorities had been aware of the suspect and had received a warning about him from Saudi Arabia in November 2023. But he said that the tip-off “was so unspecific” that the German authorities did not treat it as a signal that the man was plotting an attack.
“He was not seen to be capable of violent acts,” Mr. Munch told the German public broadcaster ZDF.
The state police in Saxony-Anhalt, which includes Magdeburg, said that they had opened an investigation after that warning and had questioned the Saudi doctor but had then closed the inquiry. The authorities said that he had not fitted their profile of an Islamic extremist and that they did not categorize him as a potential threat.
In social media posts, the doctor had criticized Germany for what he called the authorities’ tolerance of radical Islam, according to German news media. A security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that those reports were accurate.
The doctor also expressed support on social media for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party and reposted comments by the group’s leaders warning of the threat of Islamic law’s being imposed in Germany.
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