Saudi Arabia warned Germany about man being held over Magdeburg attack

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German security officials say Saudi authorities have repeatedly warned Germany about the man believed to have carried out Friday’s attack on a Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg, which killed five people and injured dozens.

The officials said Riyadh had warned German authorities that the suspected attacker, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, a Saudi dissident who described himself as an ex-Muslim, had bragged on social media that “something big is going to happen in Germany.” . It was unclear whether police ever acted on the warnings.

Al-Abdulmohsen’s numerous posts on the social media site

Five people were killed and more than 200 injured when a man rammed the Magdeburg Christmas market on Friday evening. Al-Abdulmohsen, the suspected attacker, was arrested at the scene. Authorities described him as a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia who came to Germany in 2006 and worked as a psychiatrist in Bernburg, south of Magdeburg.

The attack has dampened sentiment in a country already grappling with a deep economic slump and a period of political uncertainty following the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s shaky three-party coalition government in November.

It has been almost eight years to the day since an IS fighter rammed a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people and injuring 49, in one of Germany’s worst terrorist attacks of all time.

Scholz visited Magdeburg on Saturday, called the incident a “horrible act” and promised to “leave no stone unturned” in solving the crime.

Al-Abdulmohsen was an activist who publicly renounced Islam after leaving Saudi Arabia and created a website to help opponents of the regime in Riyadh – particularly women – escape the country and apply for asylum in Europe.

His interviews and social media posts reveal him as a militant critic of Islam who had sympathies with the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party that strongly opposes Muslim immigration.

In recent months he has become increasingly hostile to Germany, criticizing its strict hate speech laws that ban incitement against certain religious or ethnic groups.

He gave German newspapers extensive interviews about his involvement in 2019 and described 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.

“After 25 years in this business, you think nothing could surprise you anymore,” Peter Neumann, an expert on terrorism at King’s College London, wrote 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.”

In one of the interviews in 2019, he said that he “renounced” Islam in 1997.

“I found life in Saudi Arabia to be torture. You have to pretend to be 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 Saudi ex-Muslim, I applied for asylum.”

In the other case, he said he wrote posts criticizing Islam on an internet forum run by imprisoned activist Raif Badawi and was subsequently threatened with his life.

“They wanted to ‘slaughter’ me if I ever returned to Saudi Arabia,” he said. “It wouldn’t have made sense to put myself at risk of having to return and then being killed.”

In recent months he appeared to have turned away from activism and turned to railing against German authorities and spreading conspiracy theories more commonly associated with the nationalist right. In some posts he claimed that he was being censored and persecuted by the German authorities.

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 been shown that Germany’s open borders policy was Merkel’s plan to Islamize Europe,” he wrote. He also called for Germany to repeal parts of its criminal code that he said were “restrictive.” . . freedom of expression” by “making it a criminal offense to insult or disparage religious teachings or practices.”

A machine gun can be seen on his X-profile and it says: “Germany is hunting Saudi asylum seekers inside and outside Germany to destroy their lives.”

In an interview earlier this month on an anti-Islam blog, he accused German authorities of running a covert operation to hunt down Saudi ex-Muslims while granting asylum to Syrian jihadists.

In recent months, his messages have taken on an increasingly threatening tone. “I assure you: If Germany wants war, we will have one,” he wrote on X in August. “If Germany wants to kill us, we will massacre them, die or go to prison with pride.”