The Christmas market on Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz is normally a place of fun. Under the shadow of the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church – bombed in 1943 and now a ghostly, jagged ruin – tourists and locals gather. Next door is the Zoological Garden, a rambling expanse of green popular with joggers, families and lovers.

On Monday at 8pm, the scene was festive. Dozens of people were visiting the square. Some were strolling; others were perched on green-painted wooden tables in the shape of Christmas trees, chatting. On either side of a pedestrian alley, stalls sold mulled wine, beer and bratwurst. For children there was hot chocolate and crepes.

From the direction of Kantstrasse, a Scania articulated lorry came into view. According to witnesses, its headlights were off. Instead of continuing down Budapester Strasse – its logical route – it veered off the road and plunged into the market.

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The lorry smashed through the middle of the alley, killing several people instantly and sending others sprawling. It continued for about 50 metres, smashing through a wooden booth and careening leftwards back into Budapester Strasse before it came to a halt. The attack lasted a few seconds.

Lana Sefovac, a Bosnian who lives in Berlin, was at the entrance of the market drinking mulled wine with his family when the vehicle – grey-painted and with Polish number plates – bore down upon him. “I was standing in front of the stall. My father was in front of me. My mum was behind,” he said. “I heard a very, very loud noise and when I turned towards it, the first thing I saw was wood flying all around because he literally smashed the first wooden booth by driving very fast.

“He was driving directly toward us, directly into us. But then he made a turn because he did not want to drive into [our] booth but where people were. He wanted to run people over. He passed 20 centimetres from my mum. She fell. My dad fell too. I turned and started screaming because I couldn’t see my mum.”

Both parents survived. “She [Mum] stood up, Dad too, and at that moment I turned and saw the truck hitting a lamppost. People were lying around it and to the side.”



For a moment there was an eerie quiet, Sefovac said. “Absolutely everyone was shocked.” Fearing a further attack, he and his parents fled.

Jan Hollitzer, 37, deputy editor of the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper, said he heard a noise as the truck smashed into wooden stalls. “Then we heard screams, and the truck came out of the market on the left side.”

Hollitzer walked across the street to the market. He saw devastation: broken glass, crockery and tables. Injured and dead people lay on the ground. “I saw the back of the truck. There were some people under the truck and it was really scary, really terrifying.”

Two American tourists, Luke Theis, 21, and Lara Colombo, 22, from Washington DC, heard the commotion. “We started seeing people running and hearing ambulances from all directions, so we walked over,” Colombo said. “It was carnage everywhere. There was blood on the floor.”

Theis added: “There were people lying on the floor. I’m not sure what their condition was. I could count about eight lying down. The biggest mental images I have is there were two rivers of blood going down the floor.”



Another witness, Mike Fox, from Birmingham, said the truck missed him by three metres. “It happened so fast that there was nothing we could do to stop it,” he said. “If we’d tried to stop it we would have been crushed.” He said he saw people trapped under stalls and others who appeared to have broken limbs. “You do what you can to help who you can,” he told the Associated Press.

An Australian student, Trisha O’Neill, said she saw the truck “crushing so many people. Then all the lights went out and everything was destroyed. I could hear screaming. We all froze. Then suddenly people started to move and lift all the wreckage off people, trying to help.”



Sarah Dobler said she held the hand of one man as he lay in the street. He was in a bad way. “I’m not sure what nationality he was. He was trying to get up, but his head injury was quite severe. So I just held his hand and told him everything was going to be OK,” she told BBC Radio 5 Live.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The truck at the scene of the attack. Photograph: Action Press/Rex/Shutterstock

The front of the lorry was a wreck. Christmas decorations had become lodged in its shattered windscreen. There was no sign of the person responsible for the rampage. Onlookers chased after a potential suspect, who was arrested less than two miles away, next to the Victory Column overlooking the Tiergarten. By Tuesday, however, detectives admitted they might have arrested the wrong person.

Inside the cabin, police found the body of the truck’s registered driver, Lukasz Urban, a 37-year-old Pole. He had disappeared on Monday afternoon, and had been stabbed and shot. His boss in Poland, Ariel Zurawski, said he had helped German police identify the body. Urban’s face was swollen and bloodied, he said, adding that the driver would not have given up his vehicle without a fight.

The marketplace, next to Berlin’s glossy shopping street Kurfürstendamm, looked like a warzone. The truck had come to a stop next to a stall with the words “Faszination Weihnachten” (Christmas fascination). Its pale blue canopy was torn off. There was a lot of debris: an upended crater of Becks beer, green bottles spilled on the street; red baubles; splintered wood. And under the lorry, a full-length Christmas tree topped with a gold star.



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The toll from less than a minute of mayhem was 12 people dead – six of them Germans – and around 50 wounded. Eighteen of the injured were taken to hospital in a serious condition.

The head of the federal criminal police, Holger Münch, said detectives were working on the assumption that it was an act of terrorism, but stressed that nothing was yet proven.



At the time of the attack, several hundred people were watching the new Star Wars film, Rogue One, at the nearby Zoo Palast cinema. Stranded inside afterwards, they received calls from anxious friends and family. The police eventually let them go at 10.30pm, escorting them out through a side door.



“This is everything that we feared,” one cinemagoer, Georg Gielen, told Der Spiegel. “This is now terror in Germany.” Subsequent screenings of Rogue One were cancelled.

On Tuesday, hundreds of Berliners visited Breitscheidplatz. They lit candles and left flowers outside the Romanesque memorial church. Among them was Angela Merkel. The chancellor walked slowly past the scene, accompanied by ministers and bodyguards and carrying white roses. Inside the church – a symbol of reconciliation after the second world world war – she signed a book of condolence.

The stillness of the market was striking. Normally at that time of the day it would be full of life and kitschy music. Instead, the wooden stalls still standing were all closed.

