The suspect, a 50-year-old Saudi doctor who moved to Germany in 2006, is an ex-Muslim who expressed support for the far-Right AfD
German police had been repeatedly warned that a Saudi doctor who is suspected of ploughing a car into crowds at a Magdeburg Christmas market posed a terror threat.
Saudi Arabia’s government sent four warnings to German authorities over the extreme views of Taleb al Abdulmohsen, a former Muslim who posted of his plans to do “something big” on social media.
Abdulmohsen fled Saudi Arabia for Germany in 2006. He was granted asylum as he feared persecution over his rejection of Islam.
German authorities said on Saturday that a potential motivation for the attack was his belief that Berlin was mistreating Saudi refugees.
On social media, Abdulmohsen repeatedly condemned the “Islamisation” of Europe and expressed support for the far-Right AfD, alongside Elon Musk and conspiracist Alex Jones.
Nancy Faeser, Germany’s interior minister, said the suspect was a known “Islamophobe”.
According to the BBC, the Saudi government sent four “note verbale” warnings to Berlin over the doctor, who worked as a psychiatrist in the town of Bernburg just south of Magdeburg.
Three were sent to police and one to the foreign ministry.
In December 2023, police received a separate complaint after Abdulmohsen threatened on social media to make Germany “pay a price” for its alleged persecution of Saudi refugees.
Local and federal police investigated but concluded that he posed “no specific danger,” the German newspaper Die Welt reported, citing security sources.
Visiting the market on Saturday, Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, said it was a “terrible act... to injure and kill so many people with such brutality.”
“Almost 40 are so seriously injured that we must be very worried about them,” he said.
Prosecutor Horst Nopen said the suspect, who was detained at the scene, “has at least talked about the motive. And we have to clear up how much of that is true”.
Abdulmohsen was granted asylum in Germany in 2016 despite having a criminal record over public order offences committed three years earlier.
Abdulmohsen was well known in the Saudi diaspora for running a website helping refugees flee the Middle East.
But he was considered a “pariah” because of his paranoid and aggrandising behaviour.
Speaking on a US podcast just eight days before the attack, he said Germany was persecuting Saudi former Muslims and “actively trying to destroy their lives”.
He said the persecution was being conducted covertly by a “Gestapo-like police unit” and was taking place across the globe.
Taha Al-Hajji, legal director of the Berlin-based European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights, said: “He is a psychologically disturbed person with an exaggerated sense of self-importance.”
Saudi Arabia said in a statement that it condemned the attack and expressed its “solidarity with the German people and the families of the victims.
Jörg Lau, a well-known columnist for liberal newspaper Die Zeit, said that the attack was “an echo” of Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Breivik and was part of a “global threat” posed by far-Right terrorism.
Alice Weidel, leader of the hard-Right AfD, said that “staggering failures by the authorities made the horror of Magdeburg possible”. The party has organised a protest in Magdeburg for Monday.
Viktor Orban, the Right-wing prime minister of Hungary, told a press conference in Budapest “there is no doubt that there is a link” between the terror attack and immigration.
THE TELEGRAPH