Saudi Arabia warns Germany about man detained in Magdeburg attack

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According to German security officials, Saudi authorities 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 that left five people dead and dozens of people dead. Dozens of people were injured.

Officials said Riyadh warned German authorities that the suspected attacker, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, a Saudi dissident who described himself as a religious Hoi, boasted on social media that “something big will happen in Germany”. It is unclear whether police acted on the warnings.

Many of Al-Abdulmohsen’s posts on social networking site X reveal him to be a harsh critic of Islam who has criticized Muslim immigration to Europe and in recent months expressed growing hostility towards the German authorities, whom he accused of trying to censor him.

Five people were killed and more than 200 injured on Friday night when a man rushed into a Christmas market in Magdeburg. 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, just south of Magdeburg.

The attack darkened the mood in a country struggling with a deep economic recession and a period of political instability following the collapse of Prime Minister Olaf Scholz’s shaky three-party coalition government in November.

It’s been nearly eight years since an Islamic State fighter plowed a truck into Berlin’s Christmas market, killing 12 people and injuring 49 in one of the worst terror attacks ever. now in Germany.

Scholz visited Magdeburg on Saturday, calling the incident a “horrible act” and promising that “no stone will be left unturned” in investigating the crime.

Al-Abdulmohsen is an activist who publicly renounced Islam after leaving Saudi Arabia and created a website to help opponents of the regime in Riyadh – especially women – flee the country and seek asylum. refugees in Europe.

His interviews and social media posts paint him as a militant Islamist who harbors sympathy for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party opposed to the decision. prohibit Muslim immigration.

In recent months, he has become increasingly hostile to Germany and criticized the country’s strict hate speech laws banning incitement against certain religious or ethnic groups.

He gave extensive interviews to German newspapers about his activism 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 the field, you think nothing can surprise you anymore,” Peter Neumann, a terrorism expert at King’s College, London, wrote on X. East Germany, loving the AfD and wanting to punish Germany for its tolerance of Muslims — that’s really not on my radar.”

In a 2019 interview, he said he “separated” from Islam in 1997.

“I found life in Saudi Arabia a challenge, you have to pretend you are Muslim and follow all the rituals,” he said. “I knew I could no longer live in fear and when I realized that even anonymous activities would put my life as a former Muslim in Saudi Arabia in danger , I applied for asylum.”

On the other hand, he said he wrote articles critical of Islam on an internet forum run by jailed activist Raif Badawi and later received death threats.

“They want to ‘slaughter’ me if I go back to Saudi Arabia,” he said. “It makes no sense to put myself at risk of having to go back and then be killed.”

In recent months, he appears to have moved away from activism and turned against the German government, peddling conspiracy theories often associated with nationalist sentiment. In some posts, he accused himself of being censored and repressed by the German government.

In a post on X in November outlining “the demands of the liberal opposition in Saudi Arabia,” he called on Germany to “protect its borders against illegal immigration.” France”.

“It is clear that Germany has an open border policy [former chancellor Angela] Merkel’s plan to Islamize Europe,” he wrote. He also asked Germany to repeal sections of its penal code that he declared “limiting. . . freedom of speech” by “making it offensive [sic] insult or disregard religious doctrines and practices”.

His X-file features a picture of a machine gun and claims “Germany chases Saudi Arabian women seeking asylum, inside and outside Germany, to ruin their lives.”

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

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