Anti-Islam Saudi immigrant held over Magdeburg attack

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The man who drove into a crowd of people at a Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg on Friday evening, killing four people, is a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia who came to Germany in 2006, authorities said.

The prime minister of the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, Rainer Hasself, said the alleged perpetrator, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, was not known to police as an Islamist.

Al-Abdulmohsen’s profile on social media site X indicates that he is a fierce critic of Islam.

German media reported that he was an activist who helped opponents of Saudi Arabia’s regime flee the country and apply for asylum in Europe.

Abdulmohsen allegedly drove his black BMW X5 into a Christmas market in central Magdeburg shortly after 7pm on Friday, hitting dozens of people before being arrested by police.

A video on social media showed officers surrounding him at a tram stop. He was found lying on the ground next to his car, a rental car with a Munich number plate, and was later taken in for questioning.

Authorities in Saxony-Anhalt said the attack killed four people and injured more than 200 people, 41 seriously. Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited the site of the attack on Saturday.

“It’s a disaster for the city of Magdeburg and for the region and for Germany in general,” Hasself said.

Since the incident, several interviews with the alleged perpetrator have resurfaced, including one in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 2019 in which he described himself as “the most aggressive critic of Islam in history”.

He also praised the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right, anti-immigration party that is polling second behind the center-right CDU/CSU bloc ahead of Germany’s national election in February and accused of not doing enough against Germany. To fight Islamism.

“After 25 years in this business, you’d think nothing could surprise you anymore,” writes Peter Newman, an expert on terrorism at King’s College London, “but a 50-year-old Saudi ex-Muslim who lives in East Germany, loves the AfD and its Islamists.” Wanting to punish Germany for tolerance – which wasn’t really on my radar.”

The incident marks nearly eight years since Islamic State terrorists plowed a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz in 2016, killing 12 and injuring 49 others.

Much is unclear about al-Abdulmohsen and his possible motivations.

According to German media reports, the alleged attacker was born in the Saudi city of Hofuf and came to study in Germany in March 2006. He was granted refugee status in July 2016 after claiming he was threatened with death for apostatizing from Islam.

Authorities said he worked as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist in Bernburg, a city of 32,000 between Halle and Magdeburg.

Spiegel Online reported that she was an activist who helped people — especially women — escape from Saudi Arabia and ran an Internet site providing information about the German asylum system. In 2019 he gave interviews about his activities to two German newspapers where he expressed his hatred of Islam.

In one, he said he had “broken off” from the religion in 1997.

“I found life in Saudi Arabia an ordeal, you have to pretend you are a Muslim and follow all the rituals,” he said. “I knew I could no longer live in fear and when I realized that anonymous activism would also endanger my life as a Saudi ex-Muslim, I applied for asylum.”

In another, he said he wrote posts criticizing Islam on an Internet forum run by jailed activist Raif Badawi and subsequently received threats against his life.

“They wanted to “slaughter” me when I returned to Saudi Arabia,” he said. “There was no point in returning and then exposing myself to the risk of being killed.”

In recent months, he has moved away from activism and adopted a highly critical attitude towards the German authorities that has often dismissed conspiracy theories associated with the nationalist right.

In a post on X in November he called on Germany to “defend its borders against illegal immigration”, setting out “the demands of the Saudi liberal opposition”.

“It became clear that Germany had an open border policy [former chancellor Angela] Merkel’s plan to Islamize Europe,” he wrote. He also called for the repeal of sections of the German Penal Code that he claimed “limit . . . free speech” by “making it a crime.” [sic] Disparaging or disparaging religious doctrine or practice”.

His X profile features a machine gun and claims “Germany chases female 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 Saudi ex-Muslims for harboring Syrian jihadists.