On Monday, the German Bundestag’s Internal Affairs Committee convened an emergency meeting to discuss the attack on the Magdeburg Christmas market. On December 20, a Saudi Arabian psychiatrist, driving a rented BMW, had driven through the market in a rampage, killing five people and injuring around 230.
The committee’s meeting likely raised more questions than new insights. It is now known that the police had issued a warning about the suspect, but it is unclear why his workplace, a forensic clinic for addicts, was not informed. Moreover, a string of suspicious statements, even criminal acts, did not lead to a closer examination of the perpetrator, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen. “If the attacker had been a classic Islamist, such an attack would have been less likely” concluded FDP member Konstantin Kuhle after the committee meeting.
The AfD’s internal affairs spokesperson demanded, “If someone makes murder threats against innocent people, they must lose their right to be in the country!”
SPD member Sebastian Hartmann criticized the security concept, referencing the recent complaints and lawsuits filed against the city, the Magdeburg police station, and the Christmas market organizer. Despite the barriers, there was still enough space for “two tanks in the traffic flow” Hartmann said.
While the committee meeting unsurprisingly saw the Interior Minister, Nancy Faeser, pushing for the adoption of her latest package of laws, which includes biometric facial recognition, the CDU demanding the storage of IP addresses, there are now indications of far more mundane security lapses.
Three weeks before the attack, the Christmas market organizer, the Weihnachtsmärkte GmbH, had sent an email to the Magdeburg police’s response unit, complaining that the police’s mobile units had been parked in the wrong spots. The security concept for the Christmas market had envisioned a police car closing the gap between the concrete bollards. In the email, the author wrote:
“In the Hartstraße area, the police vehicles are often parked in the wrong positions. I politely asked the colleagues, and they told me they didn’t have any information about the deployment here.”
At the time of the attack, a police car was parked in the taxi stand, but not at the intended spot between the bollards. A spokesperson for the state government only stated, “Why this was the case is the subject of further investigation.