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Saudi authorities repeatedly warned Germany about the man alleged to have carried out Friday’s attack on a Christmas market in the east German city of Magdeburg that left five dead and dozens injured, according to German security officials.
The officials said Riyadh warned the German authorities the suspected attacker, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, a Saudi dissident who described himself as an ex-Muslim, had boasted on social media that “something big will happen in Germany”. It was unclear if police ever acted upon the warnings.
Al-Abdulmohsen’s many posts on social media site X reveal him as a fierce critic of Islam who railed against Muslim immigration into Europe and in recent months exhibited a growing hostility to the German authorities, whom he accused of trying to censor him.
Five people were killed and more than 200 injured on Friday evening when a man rammed into Magdeburg’s Christmas market. 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 had been working as a psychiatrist in Bernburg, just south of Magdeburg.
The attack has darkened the mood in a country already struggling with a profound economic slump and a phase of political uncertainty following the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s shaky three-party coalition government in November.
It came almost eight years to the day after an Islamic State militant ploughed a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12, and injuring 49 in one of Germany’s worst ever terror attacks.
Scholz visited Magdeburg on Saturday, calling the incident a “terrible deed” and promising that “no stone will be left unturned” in investigating 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 — flee the country and apply for asylum in Europe.
His interviews and social media posts reveal him as a militant critic of Islam who nurtured sympathies for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party fiercely opposed to Muslim immigration.
In recent months he had become increasingly hostile to Germany, and critical of its strict hate speech laws which prohibit incitement against certain religious or ethnic groups.
He gave extensive interviews to German newspapers about his activism 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.
“After 25 years in this business, you think nothing could surprise you any more,” wrote Peter Neumann, an expert in terrorism at King’s College, London, on X. “But a 50-year-old Saudi ex-Muslim who lives in East Germany, loves the AfD and wants to punish Germany for its tolerance towards Islamists — that really wasn’t on my radar.”
In one of the 2019 interviews, he said he had “broken away” from Islam in 1997.
“I found life in Saudi Arabia an ordeal, you have to pretend you’re a Muslim and follow all the rituals,” he said. “I knew I could no longer live in fear and when I realised that even anonymous activism would put my life in danger as a Saudi ex-Muslim, I applied for asylum.”
In the other, he said he had written posts criticising Islam in an internet forum run by the jailed activist Raif Badawi and subsequently received threats to his life.
“They wanted to ‘slaughter’ me if I ever returned to Saudi Arabia,” he said. “It wouldn’t have made any sense to expose myself to the risk of having to return and then be killed.”
In recent months, he appeared to have moved away from activism and switched to railing against the German authorities, peddling conspiracy theories more often associated with the nationalist right. In some posts he alleged he was being censored and persecuted by the German authorities.
In a post on X in November setting out the “demands of the Saudi liberal opposition” he called on Germany to “protect its borders against illegal immigration”.
“It has become evident that Germany’s open borders policy was [former chancellor Angela] Merkel’s plan to Islamise Europe,” he wrote. He also demanded Germany repeal sections of its penal code that he claims “limit . . . free speech” by “making it an offense [sic] to insult or belittle religious doctrines or practices”.
His X profile features a machine gun and claims “Germany chases female Saudi asylum seekers, inside and outside Germany, to destroy their lives”.
In an interview earlier this month on an anti-Islam blog he accused the German authorities of carrying out a covert operation to hunt down Saudi ex-Muslims while granting asylum to Syrian jihadis.
In recent months his messages took on an increasingly threatening tone. “I assure you: if Germany wants war, we’ll have one,” he wrote on X in August. “If Germany wants to kills us, we’ll massacre them, die or go with pride to prison.”
