Taleb Abdul Jawad is singled out as guilty of the attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg – arrested immediately afterwards
So far, five people have died in the suspected terrorist attack in Magdeburg on Friday evening. According to German media and Reuters, the perpetrator is Taleb Abdul Jawad, a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia who first came to Germany in 2006.
The motive behind the act is not completely clear, but more and more the image of Abdul Jawad is emerging as a strong opponent of Islam, a religion he himself allegedly broke with in the late 1990s.
In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2019, he paints the picture of himself as the “most aggressive critic of Islam ever”.
In 2016, Abdul Jawad was granted asylum in Germany, as he reportedly feared for his life in his home country.
Warned the man several times
Media reports claim that Saudi Arabia warned German authorities about the man on several occasions, because he had spread extremist messages online.
But despite that, he was not flagged as a security threat until yesterday.
– According to reports in the German media, he is said to have started an organization that wants to help other people leave Islam. But a few years ago he must have become more and more extreme in his views, says TV4 Nyhetern’s Jona Källgren, on location in Magdeburg.
“Germany will have to pay”
It is above all on social media that the man has openly shown his distaste for Islam and expressed his support for the right-wing populist party AfD.
The German newspaper Focus reports that Abdul Jawad gave an interview to a conspiracy theory blog just days before the crime. There he is said to have spoken of a “hidden secret operation” by German authorities, aimed at ex-Muslims.
According to Welt, he threatened several times about “revenge” and is said to have written in a now-deleted post on X that “Germany will have to pay the price”.
Scholz: Terrible disaster
Terror researcher Hans Brun is surprised by the preliminary information about the designated perpetrator.
– He is actually far too old for this type of action. He is by all accounts quite well established, he says.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz condemns the attack, which he calls a “terrible disaster”. On site in Magdeburg, he says that close to 40 people have such serious injuries that “we have to worry about them”.
Later in the evening, Scholz is also expected to participate in a memorial service in the city’s cathedral.