Germany’s leading Catholic prelate has expressed shock and sorrow following the death of at least 12 people in a suspected terrorist attack on the country’s capital.
In a statement on the German Bishops’ Conference website, the chairman of the conference, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, said: “My compassion is for the relatives of the dead and the injured. For all I will pray. In this difficult hour for the city of Berlin and our country, we have to stand together as a society.”
The attack took place on Monday evening when a lorry ploughed into Christmas shoppers at the busy market in front of the Protestant Emperor William Memorial church in Berlin. The suspect has been identified in German media reports as a 23-year-old Pakistani asylum seeker who arrived in Germany last year, although no official confirmation has yet been provided by the police.
“For now we know little of this deed for certain,” the German chancellor Angela Merkel, told a press conference, “but given the current information we have we have to assume we are dealing with a terrorist attack”.
Anti-immigrant parties have already begun to blame the Chancellor for the atrocity, suggesting her “open-door” policy on migrants that saw over 1 million refugees enter Germany last year, paved the way for last night’s incident, as well other terrorist attacks by refugees in recent months in Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg.
At the press conference Merkel recognised that if the suspect is found to be a refugee it would be “particularly repugnant in the face of the many, many Germans who have dedicated themselves day after day to helping refugees, and in the face of the many people who actually need our protection and try to integrate into our country”.
Early on Tuesday morning a special police force stormed a refugee shelter in Berlin where the suspected driver of the lorry was registered. Police did not arrest anyone in the raid on the shelter, home to roughly 2,000 refugees, but a laptop and phone were seized, reported the Guardian.
Prayer vigils will be held today for victims and their families. Archbishop of Berlin, Heiner Koch, will lead Mass at the Catholic Cathedral of St Hedwig’s at midday. The Archbishop told a German radio station that while the attack must not be minimised, everything must be done to prevent outbreaks of rage.
The Chairman of the German Protestant Churches, Bishop Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, said: “We are all shattered by such brutal and senseless violence which so many innocent people have fallen victim to.” The attack was a “horrifying and cowardly act of violence, he added.
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