Magdeburg, Germany. Friday December 20. It was 7:03 p.m. local time when a man, boarding a BMW vehicle, mowed down the crowd at a Christmas market for nearly 400 meters. A 9-year-old boy and four women, aged 45 to 75, were killed in the attack, and more than 200 people were injured. A toll that could further increase. Presented to a judge on Saturday evening, the suspect was remanded in custody for murder, attempted murder and serious bodily harm. According to German media, the day before the attack, he had ignored a judicial summons to Berlin, where he was being prosecuted for a scandal in a police station which refused to register his complaint.
Three days after the events, a question remains: what were the motivations of this 50-year-old Saudi doctor, a refugee in Germany since 2006? In a press statement, local prosecutor Horst Walter Nopens said the crime “could have as a background dissatisfaction with the way refugees from Saudi Arabia are treated in Germany.”
Criticism of the authorities
“The opinions and statements of the suspect will be examined as well as the clues and procedures with the various authorities and the justice system, in order to draw the appropriate conclusions,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said in a press release. Since Saturday, the German authorities have begun to shed light on the motivations behind what Chancellor Olaf Scholz described as a “terrible” and “crazy” act. And it was by looking at the past statements of Taleb Jawad al-Abdulmohsen, the alleged perpetrator of the attack, that the investigators put forward the first hypotheses.
Last August, the man exposed his extremist ideology on the social network January 2019 and I couldn’t find it. Among other things, the psychiatrist criticized the authorities for not sufficiently protecting Saudis fleeing their country, and for being generous towards Muslim refugees from the Middle East. Public statements which led to him being described as “Islamophobic” by Nancy Faeser.
Opponent of Islam
And according to the German magazine Der Spiegelthis incitement to hatred did not date from recent months. A year ago, the Saudi secret services sent a warning to their German counterparts in the BND about Taleb Jawad al-Abdulmohsen. At issue: one of his tweets in which he threatened Germany with a “price” to pay for its treatment of Saudi refugees. But after a “risk” assessment last year, the German police judged that he did not present a “particular danger”, reports the daily Die Welt. Already in 2013, the suspect was fined in Rostock, in northeastern Germany, for “disturbing public order” and “threats to commit crimes”.
Even within the Saudi community exiled in Germany, Taleb Jawad al-Abdulmohsen was frightening. Mina Ahadi, president of the Central Council of Former Muslims, describes him to AFP as an “ultra-right conspiracy-minded psychopath” who hates all those who do not share his hatred.
An element that troubles investigators. According to Nancy Faeser, the suspect “acted in an incredibly cruel and brutal manner, like an Islamist terrorist, although his ideology appears to be that of an opponent of Islam.” In the coming days, the authorities have a major mission: to draw up a portrait of the alleged perpetrator “who does not correspond to any known profile”.