GERMAN authorities were warned last year about the suspected perpetrator of Friday evening’s car attack at a Christmas market in Magdeburg, a government office said today, as more details emerged about the five people killed.

“This was taken seriously, like every other of the numerous tips,” the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees said on social media today about the tip it said it received in the late summer of last year.

But the office also stressed it is not an investigative body and referred the information to the responsible authorities, following the procedure in such cases. It gave no other details about the suspect or the nature of the warnings.

Police in Magdeburg, a central city on the banks of the Elbe, said on Sunday that those who died were four women aged 45, 52, 67 and 75, as well as a nine-year-old boy they had spoken of a day earlier.

Authorities said 200 people were injured, 41 if them seriously. They were being treated in multiple hospitals in the city and beyond.

Authorities have identified the suspect as a Saudi doctor who arrived in Germany in 2006 and had received permanent residency.

The suspect was brought before a judge behind closed doors on Saturday evening, who ordered that he be kept in custody pending a possible indictment.

Police haven’t publicly named the suspect, but several German news outlets identified him as Taleb A, withholding his last name in line with privacy laws, and reported that he was a specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy.

Describing himself as an ex-Muslim, the suspect appears to have been an active Twitter user, sharing dozens of tweets and retweets daily focusing on anti-Islam themes, criticising the religion and congratulating Muslims who had left the faith.

He also accused German authorities of failing to do enough to combat what he referred to as the “Islamification of Europe.” He also appears to have been a supporter of the far-right Alternative for Germany party.

Hungary's far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban used the attack in Germany to lash out at the European Union’s migration policies and described it as a “terrorist act.”