All surviving victims of the Magdeburg Christmas market attack are in a stable condition after being taken to hospital mostly with broken bones and internal bleeding, a local hospital official has told a German newspaper.
In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper published late on Wednesday, the director of intensive care at the university hospital in Magdeburg said the vast majority of the 72 injured people treated after the car ramming had been released.
“Of the 15 most seriously injured, who reached our hospital in an unstable condition, we were able to stabilize all of them – including some children,” the newspaper quoted emergency room physician Robert Werdehausen as saying.
Werdehausen said the most common injuries were multiple fractures of the arms and legs, but also of the pelvis with high blood loss.
The perpetrator, a doctor originally from Saudi Arabia who came to Germany in 2006, had driven a large BMW car through crowds at the Christmas market on Friday evening, killing five people and injuring as many as 235.
Investigations into his motives are ongoing. In the weeks before the attack, he increasingly expressed himself erratically and radically on social media.
The 50-year-old had said he was a fan of X owner Elon Musk and the far-right anti-migrant AfD party, which, he claimed, pursued the same goals as he did.
“The people had no large wounds, but heavy internal bleeding, which then led to shock,” said Werdehausen, the director of the University Clinic for Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care.
From a medical point of view, hopes had been raised because there were few head injuries, he said. The inability to save some patients was not due to the high volume of emergencies but rather the severity of their injuries, he added.
“Of the patients assigned to us, two died: a nine-year-old boy and an adult female patient. The nine-year-old had already been resuscitated at the Christmas market, but unfortunately it was no longer possible to continue these measures after he arrived at our centre. The second patient also had such severe injuries that there were no longer any meaningful treatment options when she came to us.”
Werdehausen said he was glad that emergency workers had trained for such extreme scenarios. “This enabled us to provide the patients with very good and timely care.”
In the minutes and hours after the attack, emergency workers were deployed in teams according to a predetermined plan, while additional personnel were recruited via a digital alerting system.
In the end, there were 520 employees from all professional groups who had offered to help. “We couldn’t even deploy all the volunteers,” the doctor said.
Source: dpa.com