BERLIN — A terrorist attack using a tractor-trailer to plow through a crowded Christmas market in central Berlin left Germans stunned and shocked on Tuesday, and the authorities scrambling to determine who was behind the nation’s bloodiest assault in decades.
The aftermath of the attack mixed a strong sense of mourning with anger on the right and a dawning nationwide realization that Germany, too, now counted itself among the front ranks of European countries, alongside France and Belgium, that have suffered large-scale attacks in recent years.
Early in the day, a somber chancellor,
Angela Merkel, dressed in black, acknowledged what people across Europe had been fearing with the approach of the holiday season: One of the Continent’s ubiquitous Christmas markets appeared to have been targeted for assault, killing 12 and injuring dozens.
“We must assume at the current time that it was a terrorist attack,” Ms. Merkel told reporters on Tuesday.
She later appeared in a black wool coat, bearing a white rose to lay at a memorial outside of the church in the heart of western Berlin, where a traditional holiday market was transformed into a scene of carnage late Monday.
Even as she was mourning, Peter Frank, the country’s federal prosecutor, insisted that while the similarities to last summer’s Bastille Day attack in Nice, France, led his office to suspect that the Berlin attack was motivated by terrorism, he was unable to produce any hard evidence.
A 23-year-old Pakistani was detained roughly an hour after the attack, but through the day German authorities mixed habitual caution with what appeared to be growing uncertainty that the young man, who may have entered the country seeking asylum last December, was indeed the driver of the truck.
looney alert
your thinking's of a white man have you ever been to Pakistan
