MAGDEBURG, Germany — The number of people injured in the car-ramming attack at a Christmas market in the central German city of Magdeburg has risen to 235, prosecutors say.

Five people were killed, including a nine-year-old boy and four women aged between 45 and 75, when a man drove a car through the crowd at the Christmas market on Friday evening.

Authorities had previously reported that 200 people were injured in the incident.

The suspect, a Saudi national identified only as Taleb A according to German privacy laws, has been living in Germany since 2006 and was granted political refugee status in 2016. He was most recently working as a doctor in the town of Bernburg, south of Magedeburg.

He was detained at the scene and is being held in police custody.

Magdeburg, a city of some 237,000 to the west of Berlin, is the capital of the state of Saxony-Anhalt.

The Interior Ministry of the northern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern said on Monday that Taleb A became known to authorities as a potential suspect in 2015.

Regional authorities had informed the Federal Criminal Police Office at the Joint Counter-Terrorism Centre, which is supported by Germany's federal and regional government, about the man's possible intention to carry out an attack on February 6, 2015, it said.

The report concerned threats to carry out actions that would attract international attention against a medical association in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in April 2013 and one year later against a local authority in the northern German city of Stralsund.

The Mecklenburg-Vorpommern interior minister, Christian Pegel, said the 50-year-old suspect had lived in the state from 2011-16 and had completed parts of his specialist medical training in Stralsund.

He said the man had been involved in a dispute with the medical association about the recognition of examination results and had later threatened the social services in Stralsund in an attempt to obtain assistance with living costs.

A district court fined Taleb A for threatening the medical association, Pegel said.

However, he added, the previous investigations had not revealed any evidence of real preparations for an attack or Islamist connections.

The man was warned by the police and told that he would be monitored more closely, but was not been classified as a threat, Pegel said.