Crowd boos German Chancellor Scholz as he visits Magdeburg after Christmas market attack

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser were booed as the officials paid a visit to Magdeburg after the terrorist attack at the city's Christmas market, the Berliner Zeitung newspaper reports.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons by John, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Christmas fair

According to the newspaper, the crowd whistled and shouted "Get lost!" to the officials. A woman in the crowd addressed Scholz saying: "Do something! Or is something even worse than this should happen?"

In the evening of December 20, a car ploughed into a busy Christmas market in the city of Magdeburg. Five were killed, 205 were injured. The official representative of the government of Saxony-Anhalt, Matthias Schuppe, called the incident a terrorist attack.

The suspect in the attack was said to be a refugee. He works in Germany as a medical specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy. According to the Berliner Zeitung, the man is an anti-Islamist activist from Saudi Arabia. He was arrested.

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Magdeburg is the capital of the German state Saxony-Anhalt. The city is situated on the Elbe river. Otto I, the first Holy Roman Emperor and founder of the Archbishopric of Magdeburg, was buried in the city's cathedral after his death. Magdeburg's version of German town law, known as Magdeburg rights, spread throughout Central and Eastern Europe. In the Late Middle Ages, Magdeburg was one of the largest and most prosperous German cities and a notable member of the Hanseatic League. One of the most notable people from the city was Otto von Guericke, famous for his experiments with the Magdeburg hemispheres. Magdeburg is situated on Autobahn 2 and Autobahn 14, and hence is at a connection point of Eastern Europe (Berlin and beyond) with Western Europe, as well as the north and south of Germany. For the modern city, the most significant industries are: machine industry, healthcare industry, mechanical engineering, environmental technology, circular economy, logistics, culture industry, wood industry and information and communications technology.