The death toll from a car crash at a Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg has risen to five, Saxony-Anhalt Prime Minister Rainer Haseloff said.

According to Haseloff, more than 200 people were injured, many of them seriously, Reuters reports. The authorities said in a statement that a small child was among the dead.

According to preliminary information, the car ramming was deliberate, and the driver was a Saudi Arabian. He was immediately detained.

Later, many media outlets, including the BBC, named the man as Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen.

As Haseloff reported earlier, the 50-year-old suspect is a psychiatrist who lived and worked in the city of Bernburg. He came to Germany to study in 2006 and stayed, having been recognized as a refugee in 2016. Presently he has a permanent residence permit.

The authorities believe that the man acted alone. According to Spiegel magazine, he had previously publicly expressed sympathy for the far-right Alternative for Germany party. Interior Minister Nancy Feser also mentioned his “Islamophobic” views.

Prosecutor Nopens said that investigators were still looking into the motives of the attacker, but they were allegedly related to dissatisfaction with the treatment of refugees from Saudi Arabia in Germany.

According to Reuters, citing its own sources in Saudi Arabia, the authorities of this country warned Berlin about the potential attacker, since he expressed views on social media that “threaten peace and security.”

BBC correspondent Frank Gardner later confirmed this information with a source close to the Saudi government, who asked for anonymity. According to the source, Riyadh sent four official letters (verbal notes) to the German authorities with detailed information about Taleb al-Abdulmohsen and his “markedly extremist views.”

The letters were sent to the German Foreign Ministry and its intelligence services, and all were ignored, the source claims.