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Saudi authorities have repeatedly warned Germany about a man suspected of attacking a Christmas market in the East German city of Magdeburg on Friday, killing five people and injuring dozens, German security officials said.
Officials said Riyadh said the suspected attacker, Taleb al-Abdelmohsen, a Saudi dissident who calls himself a former Muslim, boasted on social media that “something big is going to happen in Germany.” He reportedly alerted German authorities. It is unclear whether police acted on the warning.
Many of Al-Abdelmohsen’s posts on social media site has become clear.
A man crashed into a Christmas market in Magdeburg on Friday night, killing five people and injuring more than 200. The suspected attacker, Al Abdulmohsen, was arrested at the scene. Authorities said he was a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia who came to Germany in 2006 and worked as a psychiatrist in Bernburg, just south of Magdeburg.
The attack darkened the mood in a country already suffering a deep economic recession and a phase of political uncertainty since the collapse of Prime Minister Olaf Scholz’s unstable three-party coalition government in November.
It has been almost eight years since Islamic State militants rammed a truck into a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 people and injuring 49 in one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in Germany’s history.
Scholz visited Magdeburg on Saturday, calling the incident a “terrible act” and vowing “to leave no stone unturned” in investigating the crime.
Al Abdul Mohsen is an activist who publicly renounced Islam after leaving Saudi Arabia and created a website to help dissidents in Riyadh, especially women, flee the country and apply for asylum in Europe. It was.
His interviews and social media posts show that he has developed sympathies with Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party that is a critic of Islamic extremism and fiercely opposes Muslim immigration. It has become clear.
He has become increasingly hostile to Germany in recent months, criticizing strict hate speech laws that prohibit incitement against certain religious or ethnic groups.
He gave extensive interviews to German newspapers about his activities in 2019, describing himself to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as “the most aggressive critic of Islam in history.” “If you don’t believe me, ask the Arabs,” he said.
Peter Newman, a terrorism expert at King’s College in London, wrote in the X newspaper: “After 25 years in this job, you would think that nothing could be more surprising.” East Germany loves the AfD and wants to punish Germany for its tolerance of Islamists, but that never occurred to them. ”
In one of his 2019 interviews, he said he “made a break” with Islam in 1997.
“I felt living in Saudi Arabia was a test. You have to pretend to be a Muslim and follow all the rituals,” he said. “I decided that I could no longer live in fear. As a former Muslim in Saudi Arabia, I applied for asylum when I realized that my life was at risk, even if my activities were anonymous. ”
In another article, he wrote a post critical of Islam on an internet forum run by imprisoned activist Raif Badawi, and said he subsequently received death threats.
“When I returned to Saudi Arabia, they were going to ‘massacre’ me,” he said. “There is no point in returning and putting yourself at risk of being killed.”
In recent months, he appears to have shifted away from activism and instead focused on criticizing German authorities, often promoting conspiracy theories linked to the nationalist right. In several posts, he claimed that he was being censored and persecuted by German authorities.
In a November post on X stating “the demands of the Saudi liberal opposition,” he called on Germany to “secure our borders from illegal immigration.”
“It has become clear that Germany’s open borders policy was a plan by Chancellor Angela Merkel to Islamize Europe,” he wrote. He also called on Germany to abolish what he called “restrictive” provisions in its criminal law. . . Freedom of speech is granted by making it a crime to “insult or disrespect religious doctrine or practice.”
His X profile features a machine gun and claims that “Germany is tracking female Saudi asylum seekers in Germany and abroad and destroying their lives.”
In an interview with an anti-Muslim blog earlier this month, he accused German authorities of running a covert operation to hunt down ex-Muslims in Saudi Arabia while granting asylum to Syrian jihadists.
In recent months, his messages have taken on an increasingly threatening tone. “I guarantee you: if Germany wants war, we will go to war too,” he wrote to X in August. “If Germany wants to kill us, we will slaughter them, die or go to prison with pride.”
