NEW YORK — The terrorist attack on a Christmas market in Berlin on Monday (Dec 19) evening killed 12 people and wounded at least 48 others, many of them gravely. At least half of the dead were German citizens.

Below are brief portraits of the victims known so far.

DALIA ELYAKIM, A ‘GOOD SOUL’

Dalia Elyakim, an Israeli who was visiting Berlin with her husband, had been missing since Monday evening, when the truck plowed into the crowd at the market. Her husband, Mr Rami, was seriously wounded, but he is now in stable condition.

“I received with great sadness the news of the death of Dalia Elyakim in the horrific terror attack in Berlin,” President Reuven Rivlin of Israel said on Thursday, after the Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed the news.

The couple, in their 60s, had travelled from their home in the central Israeli city of Herzliya. Mr Moshe Egoz, a longtime friend, described Dalia Elyakim as a “good soul”. He told Israeli Army Radio that “they loved to travel, especially around Christmas-time”. He said he had been following their trip to Berlin through her posts on Facebook.

According to the Facebook page, Elyakim was originally from Haifa, attended Galilee High School in Tiberias and studied at Ohalo College, which trains teachers.

In August 2009, she posted a series of pictures from Berlin, including shots of the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, remnants of the Berlin Wall and an old Allied checkpoint, although those images evidently came from a previous winter, since some included Christmas trees.

Another photograph on her page was captioned: “Amazing grapes that grow in my garden.”

More than 70 years after the Holocaust, Berlin lately has become a magnet for Jews attracted to its cosmopolitan sensibilities, modern conveniences and economic possibilities. Only about 8,000 Jews were left in Berlin after World War II, down from a prewar high of 180,000, but today, some estimate that about 45,000 live in the German capital, as many as a third of them from Israel.

FABRIZIA DI LORENZO, AN ITALIAN LIVING IN BERLIN

Fabrizia Di Lorenzo, a 31-year-old Italian living in Germany, had been missing since the attack. The Italian foreign minister, Angelino Alfano, confirmed on Thursday morning that she had been killed. She was from Sulmona, in the Abruzzo region east of Rome, and had master’s degrees from universities in Bologna and Milan.

Mr Andrea D’Addio, the editor of Berlino Magazine, an online publication aimed at Italian expatriates in the German capital, said that Di Lorenzo had written for the magazine. “She loved Germany and wrote sociopolitical and geopolitical pieces for us,” he said.

Mr D’Addio said that Di Lorenzo had studied in Berlin on the Erasmus exchange programme of the European Union, and that she had then done an internship at the Italian Chamber of Commerce in Vienna. She returned to Berlin in 2013, where she worked in customer care for a car-sharing service, and later for a logistics company.

Relatives of Di Lorenzo who live in the Boston area told a television station there that she had been deeply committed to international affairs and concerned about the migration crisis.

Pictures that she posted online from various sites in Berlin included a rooftop view with the television tower in Alexanderplatz in the background; a sunset near the parliament, featuring the glass dome over the Reichstag; and the contemporary steel-and-glass architecture at Potsdamer Platz. She had also posted pictures showing gondolas in Venice and grass fields in the mountains of Abruzzo. Her background profile picture is a bridge in eastern Berlin. Commenting on one picture, she wrote #inlovewithyouberlin.

LUKASZ URBAN, TRUCK DRIVER

Lukasz Urban wanted to return home to Poland for Christmas.

A long-haul truck driver, he had been on the road for more than a week when he left Turin, Italy, on Sunday for the drive to Germany. His load: 25 tons of steel beams, destined for a warehouse owned by a subsidiary of ThyssenKrupp. He arrived in Berlin early on Monday, but the delivery was scheduled to arrive on Tuesday, so he was told to wait.

He parked on a street next to a canal opposite the warehouse. Around noon, he called Mr Ariel Zurawski, a cousin and the owner of the trucking company, based in the village of Sobiemysl, Poland, near the German border. They discussed whether Urban could come home sooner. He had been scheduled to continue on to Denmark and hoped to be back home by Thursday so that he would have time to buy a present for his wife.

Around 7.30pm US time (8.30am Singapore time), when the truck started moving toward the centre of Berlin, Mr Zurawski said he knew something was wrong.

“We called him “inspector” because he was never more than three minutes late,” Mr Zurawski said. “We joked that he should work for a courier company. He wouldn’t just take the truck and start driving it after hours.”

Urban had a teenage son. He had worked as a driver for 15 years and lived in Roznowo, a small village in West Pomerania, near the border with Germany.

Urban enjoyed cycling. “He often took his bike with him when he hit the road so that he could take it out whenever he had a break,” said Mr Lukasz Wasik, a manager at the trucking company.

“He talked a lot about his wife and son,” Mr Wasik said. “He was proud of his kid and loved talking about his son’s successes at school.”

Urban’s body was found inside the cab of the truck; he had been shot and stabbed. He was 37, and a stocky man — 1.8m, 120kg — and Mr Zurawski and Mr Wasik said they thought Urban had probably resisted his attacker.

Mr Patryk Jaki, Poland’s deputy minister of justice and a member of the right-wing government that took power last year, described Urban as “another victim of a terrible migrant policy of the European elites that have taken in Islamist fighters”. THE NEW YORK TIMES