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The man who ran 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, according to authorities. .
Rainer Haseloff, Prime Minister of the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, said that the alleged perpetrator of the attack, Talib al-Abdul Mohsen, was not known to the police as an Islamist.
Al-Abdul Mohsen’s page on the social networking site X indicates that he is one of the harshest critics 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.
Abdul Mohsen allegedly drove his black BMW
A video posted on social media showed officers surrounding him at a tram stop. He was seen lying on the ground next to his car, a rental car with Munich number plates, and was then taken away for questioning.
Authorities in the state of Saxony-Anhalt said that four people were killed in the attack and more than 200 people were injured, 41 of them in serious condition. Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited the site of the attack on Saturday.
“It is a disaster for the city of Magdeburg, for the region and for Germany in general,” Haseloff said.
Since the incident, a number of interviews with the alleged perpetrator have emerged, including one in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper in 2019, in which he described himself as “the most aggressive critic of Islam in history.”
He also expressed his admiration for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right, anti-immigration party that is in second place behind the center-right CDU/CSU bloc ahead of Germany's national elections in February, and accused Germany of not doing enough. To fight Islamism.
“After 25 years in this field, you think nothing can surprise you anymore,” Peter Newman, a terrorism expert at King’s College London, wrote on X. But a 50-year-old former Saudi Muslim living in the UK.” “East Germany loves the AfD and wants to punish Germany for its tolerance of Islamists – and that was really not on my radar.”
The incident comes almost eight years after 12 people were killed and 49 others injured in 2016 in Berlin's Bretzscheidplatz, when an ISIS terrorist drove a truck into a Christmas market.
Much remains unclear about the benevolent slave and his possible motives.
According to German media reports, the alleged attacker was born in the Saudi city of Al-Hofuf and came to Germany in March 2006 to study. In July 2016, he was granted refugee status after he allegedly received death threats for turning away from Islam.
Authorities said he worked as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist in Bernburg, a town of 32,000 located between Halle and Magdeburg.
Spiegel Online reported that he was an activist who helped people – women in particular – flee Saudi Arabia and ran a website providing information about the German asylum system. In 2019, he gave interviews about his activities to two German newspapers in which he expressed his hatred for Islam.
In one of them, he said that he “broke” with religion in 1997.
He said: “I found life in Saudi Arabia an ordeal. You have to pretend to be a Muslim and follow all the rituals.” “I knew I could no longer live in fear, and when I realized that even anonymous activity would put my life at risk as a former Saudi Muslim, I applied for asylum.”
In the other case, he said he wrote posts criticizing Islam on an online forum run by imprisoned activist Raif Badawi, and subsequently received death threats.
“They wanted to ‘slaughter’ me if I returned to Saudi Arabia,” he said. “It didn't make sense to put myself at risk of having to come back and then get killed.”
In recent months, he has appeared to turn away from political activism and adopted a highly critical stance on German authorities that has fueled conspiracy theories often 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 become clear that Germany's open borders policy was (former Chancellor Angela) Merkel's plan to Islamize Europe,” he wrote. He also called on Germany to repeal sections of the penal code that he claims “restrict….” . . Freedom of expression” by “criminalizing insulting or belittling religious doctrines or practices.”
His profile shows
Earlier this month, he was interviewed by an anti-Islam blog and accused German authorities of carrying out a secret operation to hunt down former Saudi Muslims while granting asylum to Syrian jihadists.
