Five dead. This is the provisional assessment of the car-ramming attack that occurred on the Magdeburg Christmas market in Germany. The main suspect, a Saudi doctor, had obtained asylum on German soil and had embraced the theses of the extreme right. He was presented to a judge on Saturday evening and placed in pre-trial detention and the controversy is growing in view of the numerous reports made to the German authorities over several years.
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The German government promised this Sunday, December 22, an investigation to clarify possible errors by the authorities in preventing the deadly car-ramming attack committed this Friday at the Magdeburg Christmas market. Four women aged 45 to 75 and a 9-year-old boy were killed, according to a still provisional report.
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“ The investigating authorities will clarify all aspects of the case » which will include “ a careful examination of existing clues in the past and how they were tracked », declared the Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, to the Sunday newspaper Bild am Sonntag.
Sign of pressure on the chancellor’s government Olaf Scholztwo months before early elections at the end of February: Nancy Faeser will be heard from December 30 on the dysfunctions that may have led to the attack. She will be questioned, along with several senior officials, by the parliamentary control committee and the internal affairs committee of the Bundestag, the lower house of Parliament, theAFP from a parliamentary source.
Reports left unanswered
Since Friday evening, questions have arisen about the motives which pushed the suspect, a 50-year-old Saudi doctor, to commit the attack which killed five people, injuring more than 200 others, and about possible failures to alert despite the worrying signals that the alleged attacker had been sending to Germany for years.
According to the investigative magazine Der SpiegelBerlin received no fewer than three reports about Talew A., information provided by Saudi Arabia to German security services in 2023 and 2024.
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It was his messages posted on social networks that triggered these alerts: he wrote that theGermany did not treat Saudi refugees well and should pay the price. This information reached the regional authorities in Saxony-Anhalt where the tragedy occurred, but at the time, when the suspect was placed under surveillance, the police did not detect any concrete threat.
Hatred of Islam
Since March 2020, this Saudi psychiatrist has worked with drug addicts in detention, but he is also described as an activist for the cause of Saudi women, a man who had turned his back on Islam and who feared to the point of paranoia Islamization of Germany. He would have wished the death of the former German chancellorAngela Merkel on the grounds that she admitted the wrong refugees into her country.
Even in the Saudi community exiled in Germany, the man frightened: Mina Ahadi, president of the Central Council of Former Muslims, describes him as a “ ultra-right conspiracy theorist psychopath » hating all those who do not share his hatred.
The German police, after an assessment “ of risk » last year, judged that he did not present “ special danger », reports Sunday Die Welt. Presented to a judge on Saturday evening, he was placed in pre-trial detention.
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