German police said Tuesday they were
treating as “a probable terrorist attack” the killing of 12 people when a
speeding lorry cut a bloody swathe through a Berlin Christmas market.
At least 48 more were wounded when the
truck tore through the crowd Monday, smashing wooden stalls and crushing
victims, in scenes reminiscent of July’s deadly attack in the French
Riviera city of Nice.
Images showed the mangled truck with its
windscreen smashed and a trail of destruction in its wake, with
Christmas trees toppled on their side and festive stalls obliterated
into splinters.
One of the survivors, Australian Trisha
O’Neill, recalled the horror of “this huge black truck speeding through
the markets crushing so many people”, with “blood and bodies
everywhere”.
“It wasn’t an accident,” said another
visitor, Briton Emma Rushton, who was enjoying a glass of mulled wine
when the festive scene was shattered by a loud crash and screams.
“We heard a really loud bang and saw some of the Christmas lights to our left starting to be pulled down,” she told Sky news.
“Then we saw the articulated vehicle
going through people and through the stalls and just pulling everything
down and then everything went dark.”
Police detained the man believed to have
deliberately mowed the Scania truck loaded with steel beams for 80
metres (yards) into the popular tourist spot near the capital’s iconic
Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.
The suspect was an asylum seeker
believed to be from Pakistan or Afghanistan who arrived in Germany via
the so-called Balkans route in February, according to unnamed security
sources cited by DPA news agency.
Local newspapers said that, after the
truck driver left the cabin, a man followed him on foot and used his
mobile phone to stay in touch with police, who arrested him about two
kilometres away near Berlin’s Victory Column.
– Refugee shelter raid –
The suspect was believed to have stayed in a Berlin refugee shelter, DPA reported.
Overnight, police commandos raided
Berlin’s largest such shelter, a hangar of the disused Nazi-era
Tempelhof airport, famous because of the Cold War-era Berlin airlift,
public broadcaster ZDF reported.
The daily Tagesspiegel said the man behind the wheel was known to police but for minor crimes, not links to terrorism.
A Polish man, thought to have been the
truck’s registered driver, was found dead on the passenger seat, and
police said he had not steered the vehicle.
The Polish owner of the lorry, Ariel
Zurawski, had Monday confirmed his driver was missing, telling AFP: “We
don’t know what happened to him”.
“He’s my cousin, I’ve known him since I was a kid. I can vouch for him,” he said.
Lukasz Wasik of the same company said contact was lost with the 37-year-old at around 3:00pm (1400 GMT).
Wasik said GPS data indicated that the
truck was later started three times — “as if someone was practicing how
to drive it” — before it drove off at 7:34 pm local time.
– ‘We mourn the dead’ –
World leaders expressed shock at the
apparent latest attack to hit Europe, as social media users shared their
grief on Twitter using the hashtag #prayforberlin.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman
Steffen Seibert tweeted that “we mourn the dead and hope that the many
people injured can be helped,” while President Joachim Gauck called it
“a terrible evening for Berlin and our country”.
German flags flew at half-mast Tuesday and the church near the attack was planning a memorial service later Tuesday.
The suspected attack meant “our worst
fears have come true,” said conservative lawmaker Stephan Mayer, who
added that security will have to be reviewed for a all of Germany’s
Christmas markets and asked “whether they can take place at all.”
More eyewitnesses meanwhile came forward to recall the horrific scenes.
One British visitor, Mike Fox from Birmingham, told how he helped rescue people trapped under collapsed market stalls.
“I saw one guy being dragged away with
blood on his face. I helped several other people lift the side of one of
the stalls up so that they could pull two other people from
underneath.”
– High alert –
Europe has been on high alert for most
of 2016, with jihadist attacks striking Paris and Brussels, while
Germany has been hit by several assaults claimed by the Islamic State
group and carried out by asylum-seekers.
An axe rampage on a train in Bavaria
state in July wounded five people, and a suicide bombing left 15 people
injured in the same state six days later.
The arrival of 890,000 refugees last year has polarised Germany, with critics calling the influx a serious security threat.
Marcus Pretzell of the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party labelled the Christmas market victims “Merkel’s dead”.
The attack in Berlin comes five months
after Tunisian extremist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel ploughed a truck into
a crowd on the Nice seafront, killing 86 people.
President Francois Hollande said “the French share in the mourning of the Germans in the face of this tragedy”.
The United States condemned an apparent
“terrorist attack”, while President-elect Donald Trump blamed “Islamist
terrorists” for a “slaughter” of Christians.
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