A German court sentenced a 51-year-old doctor to life in prison on Friday for a car attack at a Christmas market in December 2024. The attack in Magdeburg, in eastern Germany, killed six people, including a 9-year-old child, and wounded more than 300.
The doctor, a psychiatrist who was born in Saudi Arabia, drove a rented BMW through a gap in the market’s security perimeter and then accelerated, plowing into a crowd of shoppers.
The episode was the deadliest in a series of seemingly random attacks in 2024 and 2025 carried out by foreign-born assailants in Germany. They shook Germans’ sense of security and contributed to a rise in support for the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, an anti-immigrant party.
The driver, whom the court identified only as Taleb A. to comply with German privacy law, was pulled from the car and arrested by the police immediately after the attack.
During the seven-month trial, both the defendant and his prosecutors said the attack had not been a political act or part of a wider terrorist plot. Mr. A. confessed to the crime in November, on the second day of the trial, but showed little remorse, instead focusing his testimony on perceived slights, petty arguments and seemingly trivial matters, including a complaint that his prison mattress was too hard.
In its verdict, a panel of judges ruled on Friday that Mr. A. had a “particular gravity of guilt.” That German legal nuance that means that he, unlike many other prisoners, will not automatically be allowed to apply for parole after 15 years in prison.
The trial garnered such interest that a temporary courtroom was built to accommodate 200 victims and relatives of victims who were plaintiffs in the case, as well as reporters and local residents who wanted to witness the proceedings.
Mr. A. had lived in Germany since 2006, training there as a psychiatrist and later working in psychiatric institutions, according to the German news media. At the time of the attack, he was employed at a psychiatric hospital in Bernburg, a quiet town 25 miles south of Magdeburg.
The lead judge had to read the verdict twice on Friday because Mr. A. and his attorney could not initially hear him from within the secured glass booth where the defendant was being held.
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