A familiar dread for Germany, as a national election approachespublished at 12:33 Greenwich Mean Time12:33 GMT
Jessica Parker
Berlin correspondent
Across Germany, people will have
felt a familiar sense of dread and horror on hearing these initial reports.
In
2016, a truck was driven into a Christmas market in Berlin by a Tunisian man
who was a failed asylum seeker and had been a known jihadist threat – leading
to 13 deaths.
In December last year a car ploughed through
crowds, again at a Christmas market, in the city of Magdeburg. Six people died and around 300 were injured. The suspect was a 50-year-old
Saudi man who’d been an outspoken critic of Islam.
Magdeburg was the
deadliest in a string of attacks over the last year in Germany, involving
suspects who’ve been asylum seekers.
It’s heightened an already tense migration
debate in Germany, ahead of a national election next week. While many details still aren’t known,
police say the man they’ve detained in Munich is a 24-year-old Afghan asylum
seeker who was known to them for theft and drug offences.
Bavaria’s
state premier, Markus Soder, has said what’s happened today is presumably an
attack.