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According to authorities, the man who is said to have driven into a crowd at a Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg on Friday evening, killing four people, was a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia who came to Germany in 2006 came .
Reiner Haseloff, Prime Minister of the state of Saxony-Anhalt, said the suspected perpetrator, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, was not known to the police as an Islamist.
Al-Abdulmohsen’s profile on the social media site X suggests that he is a harsh critic of Islam.
German media reported that he was an activist who helped opponents of the regime in Saudi Arabia flee the country and seek asylum in Europe.
Abdulmohsen is said to have driven his black BMW
A video on social media showed officers surrounding him at a tram stop. He was seen lying on the ground next to his vehicle, a rental car with Munich license plates, and was later taken away for questioning.
According to the authorities in Saxony-Anhalt, four people were killed in the attack and more than 200 people were injured, 41 of them seriously. Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited the crime scene on Saturday.
“This is a catastrophe for the city of Magdeburg and for the region and for Germany in general,” said Haseloff.
Since the incident, several interviews with the alleged perpetrator have resurfaced, including one in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 2019 in which he described himself as “the most aggressive critic of Islam in history.”
He also expressed admiration for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right, anti-immigrant party that is in second place behind the center-right CDU/CSU bloc ahead of Germany’s federal election in February, and accused Germany of failing to do so enough to do to fight Islamism.
“After 25 years in this business, you think nothing could surprise you anymore,” Peter Neumann, an expert on terrorism at King’s College London, wrote on X. “But a 50-year-old Saudi ex-Muslim living in… “East Germany loves the AfD and wants to punish Germany for its tolerance of Islamists – that really wasn’t on my radar.”
The incident came almost eight years to the day since 12 people were killed and 49 injured on Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz in 2016 when an Islamic State terrorist rammed a truck into a Christmas market.
Much remains unclear about al-Abdulmohsen and his possible motivation.
According to German media reports, the suspected attacker was born in the Saudi city of Hofuf and came to Germany in March 2006 to study. He was granted refugee status in July 2016 after claiming he had received death threats because of his renunciation of Islam.
According to authorities, he worked as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist in Bernburg, a city of 32,000 residents between Halle and Magdeburg.
Spiegel Online reported that he was an activist who helped people – particularly women – escape Saudi Arabia and ran a website with information about the German asylum system. In 2019, he gave interviews to two German newspapers about his activities, in which he expressed his hatred of Islam.
In one he said he had “renounced” religion in 1997.
“I found life in Saudi Arabia to be torture. You have to pretend to be Muslim and follow all the rituals,” he said. “I knew I could no longer live in fear, and when I realized that even anonymous activism would put my life in danger as a Saudi ex-Muslim, I applied for asylum.”
In the other case, he said he wrote posts criticizing Islam on an internet forum run by imprisoned activist Raif Badawi and was subsequently threatened with his life.
“They wanted to ‘slaughter’ me if I ever returned to Saudi Arabia,” he said. “It wouldn’t have made sense to put myself at risk of having to return and then being killed.”
In recent months he appeared to have turned away from activism and adopted a highly critical stance toward the German authorities, drawing on conspiracy theories more commonly associated with the nationalist right.
In a post on X in November outlining the “demands of the Saudi liberal opposition,” he called on Germany to “protect its borders from illegal immigration.”
“It has been shown that Germany’s open borders policy was Merkel’s plan to Islamize Europe,” he wrote. He also called for Germany to repeal parts of its criminal code that he said were “restrictive.” . . freedom of expression” by “making it a criminal offense to insult or disparage religious teachings or practices.”
A machine gun can be seen on his X-profile and it says: “Germany is hunting Saudi asylum seekers inside and outside Germany to destroy their lives.”
Earlier this month, he was interviewed by an anti-Islam blog and accused German authorities of running a covert operation to hunt down Saudi ex-Muslims while granting asylum to Syrian jihadists.
