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The man who allegedly drove his car into a crowd of people at a Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg on Friday night, killing four people, is a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia who came to Germany in 2006, according to authorities.
Reiner Haseloff, the prime minister of the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, said the alleged perpetrator, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, was not known to police as an Islamist.
Al-Abdulmohsen’s profile on the X social network shows that he is a fierce critic of Islam.
German media announced that he was an activist who helped opponents of the regime in Saudi Arabia to flee the country and seek asylum in Europe.
Abdulmohsen allegedly drove his black BMW X5 into a Christmas market in the center of Magdeburg just after 7pm on Friday night, running over dozens of people before being arrested by police.
A video on social media shows police officers surrounding him at a tram station. He was seen lying on the ground next to his vehicle, a rental car with Munich plates, and was later taken in for questioning.
Authorities in Saxony-Anhalt said four people were killed in the attack and more than 200 people were injured, 41 of them seriously. Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited the site of the attack on Saturday.
“This is a disaster for the city of Magdeburg and for the region and for Germany in general,” Haseloff said.
Since the incident, a series of interviews with the alleged perpetrator have resurfaced, including one in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 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 second in the polls 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 business, you think nothing can surprise you anymore,” wrote Peter Neumann, a terrorism expert at King’s College London, 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 comes nearly eight years after 12 people were killed and 49 injured in Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz in 2016 when an Islamic State terrorist drove a truck into a Christmas market.
Much remains unclear about al-Abdulmohsen and his possible motivation.
According to German media reports, the alleged attacker was born in the Saudi city of Hofuf, and in March 2006 he came to Germany to study. He was granted refugee status in July 2016 after claiming to have received death threats for turning away from Islam.
Authorities said he worked as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist in Bernburg, a town of 32,000 between Halle and Magdeburg.
Spiegel Online reported that he was an activist who helped people – especially women – to escape Saudi Arabia and ran a website that provided information about the German asylum system. In 2019, he gave interviews about his activities to two German newspapers in which he expressed his hatred of Islam.
In one, he said that he “torn away” from the faith in 1997.
“Life in Saudi Arabia was a pain for me, you have to pretend to be a 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 former Saudi Muslim, I applied for asylum.”
In another, he said he wrote posts criticizing Islam on an online forum run by jailed activist Raif Badawi and received death threats afterward.
“They wanted to “slaughter” me if I ever returned to Saudi Arabia,” he said. “It wouldn’t make sense to run the risk of having to come back and then be killed.”
In recent months, he appears to have moved away from activism and taken a highly critical stance towards the German authorities, which fed conspiracy theories more often associated with the nationalist right.
In a post on X in November in which he outlined the “demands of the Saudi liberal opposition,” he called on Germany to “protect its borders from illegal immigration.”
“It has become apparent that Germany’s open border policy was (former Chancellor Angela) Merkel’s plan to Islamize Europe,” he wrote. He also demanded that Germany repeal parts of its criminal code that it claims “restrict . . . freedom of speech” by making “insulting or denigrating religious doctrines or practices a misdemeanor”.
His X profile shows a machine gun and claims “Germany is persecuting Saudi women asylum seekers, inside and outside Germany, to destroy their lives”.
Earlier this month, he was interviewed by an anti-Islamic blog and accused German authorities of conducting a covert operation to hunt down Saudi ex-Muslims while granting asylum to Syrian jihadists.
