People lay candles and tributes at the site where a car drove into a crowd at a Magdeburg Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany Dec. 21, 2024. (Photo: REUTERS/Christian Mang)
After a Saudi Arabian man killed at least five and wounded over 200 people by ramming his car into a crowd at a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, his motivation for the attack, as well as his personal background, remain unclear.
The suspect in Saturday’s attack was named Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen, who was arrested shortly after the attack. While in detention, he tested positive for as of yet unknown drugs, German media reported.
Abdulmohsen is a Saudi national who fled to Germany in 2006 and recently worked as a doctor of psychiatry in a German hospital. Given the identity of the attacker and the scene of the attack, many initially suspected another Islamist terror attack.
The incident nearly coincided with the anniversary of another terror attack at a German Christmas market on Dec. 19, 2016, when a Tunisian asylum seeker drove a truck into a Berlin market, killing 12 people.
Abdulmohsen claimed to have fled from Saudi Arabia to seek political asylum in Germany. He publicly repudiated Islam and repeatedly attacked the religion on his public profile on 𝕏.
He was interviewed by several media outlets in the past and in recent years began warning against rapid Islamization in Germany. In this context, Abdulmohsen is said to have made pro-Israel comments and lauded Germany’s right-wing AfD party, which advocates stricter immigration policies.
Party sources told German media that Abdulmohsen was neither a member nor a registered donor of the party.
However, he increasingly began to blame German authorities for not combatting Islamization and accused the state of not doing enough to help, and even “hunting” ex-Muslims and refugees. He also claimed authorities were “systematically” stealing USB sticks from him.
For these ostensible failures, he vowed violent revenge against the German state.
German media reported that Abdulmohsen was well-known to security agencies and was reported numerous times for threatening violence online.
According to Der Spiegel magazine, in 2013, he was sentenced for “disturbing public peace by threatening criminal acts.” More recently, Saudi Arabia issued three warnings about Abdulmohsen to German security authorities, Spiegel and Reuters reported.
On Saturday, German Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said, “We can only say with certainty that the perpetrator was obviously Islamophobic.”
However, several well-known Islam critics and ex-Muslims who had online contact with Abdulmohsen raised doubts about his ostensible anti-Islam stance as being a motive for the attack.
“We are dealing with someone who claims to be ‘the greatest critic of Islam in history’,” wrote Dr. Ahmad Mansour, a psychologist and critic of Germany’s immigration policies, as well as an Israeli-Arab who later emigrated to Germany
“This grandiose fantasy alone should have made people sit up and take notice,” Mansour continued. “The same man who warns against Islamism, who claims to save people from radical Islamic persecution… carried out a terrorist attack in Magdeburg that was planned exactly according to the model of Anis Amri, the Islamist attacker at Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz.”
“This person had lost the ability to reflect on himself and to distance himself from himself,” Mansour added. “At the same time, he seems to have completely lost touch with reality. Overall, his behavior suggests a serious personality disorder.”
Other activists working with ex-Muslims said they suspected Abdulmohsen may have only pretended to have left Islam, and had other motives for his actions.
Yasmine Mohammed, an author who escaped from a forced marriage to an Al-Qaeda terrorist, said she had been familiar with Abdulmohsen for years over the internet.
“He obsessively went after an ExMuslim Saudi woman. He wanted my help in ‘exposing’ her and turned aggressive when I wouldn’t comply. Friends have shared with me that he was targeting other Saudi female activists as well.”
“There is suspicion now that he was actually working w Saudi authorities to bring down Saudi female activists. And although I cannot confirm this obviously, I will say that this theory aligns with my experience and exchanges with him,” Mohammed wrote.
“He acted ex-Muslim on the outside, while in DMs he threatened ex-Muslims, especially Saudi women who had fled,” added Ali Utlu, a German-Turkish ex-Muslim and human rights activist.
Shortly after the attack, Utlu wrote on 𝕏: “If the perpetrator is Taleb Al Abdulmohsen, then I blocked him months ago because I, like other critics of Islam, thought he was a Saudi agent who spied on renegade Saudis and ex-Muslims in Germany for the Saudi state. I’m shocked right now.”
“I didn’t believe, and still don’t believe, that he’s an apostate. Everything he did was rather confused. He even attacked me until I blocked him because I didn’t believe a word he said,” he added.
In a post on Facebook, German-Egyptian author, Hamed Abdel-Samad, said Abdulmohsen “is either a confused person or a mole.”
“After the name of the Magdeburg attacker was revealed today, I found several old messages from him in my X-mailbox. In them, he asked me to stop supporting the Secular Refugee Aid organization and wanted to speak to me personally. In his last message on November 21, he again asked me to distance myself from the secular refugee aid organization because he would soon do something that would make this organization the number one topic of conversation in the world,” Abdel-Samad wrote.
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