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The man who allegedly drove into a crowd of people at a Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg on Friday evening, killing four people, is a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia who arrived in Germany in 2006, according to authorities. .
Reiner Haseloff, the premier of eastern Saxony-Anhalt, said the suspect, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, was not known to police as a Muslim.
Al-Abdulmohsen's profile on the Internet website X indicates that he is a strong critic of Islam.
German media reported that he is a fighter who helped regime opponents in Saudi Arabia flee the country and apply for asylum in Europe.
Abdulmohsen is accused of driving his black BMW X5 to a Christmas market in central Magdeburg shortly after 7pm on Friday, plowing into a crowd of people before being arrested by police.
A video on social media showed officers surrounding him at the tram stop. He was seen lying on the ground next to his car, a rental car with Munich number plates, and was later taken in for questioning.
Authorities in Saxony-Anhalt said four people were killed in the attack and more than 200 people were injured, 41 seriously. Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited the scene on Saturday.
“This is a tragedy for the city of Magdeburg and for the region and for Germany in general,” Haseloff said.
Since the incident, several interviews with the accused have resurfaced, including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 2019 in which he described himself as “the most violent critic of Islam in history”.
He also expressed his support for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right, anti-immigration party that came in second place behind the CDU/CSU bloc ahead of Germany's national election in February, and accused Germany of not doing enough. fighting Islam.
“After 25 years in the business, you'd think nothing could be more shocking,” wrote Peter Neumann, a terrorism expert at King's College, London, in X. East Germany, likes the AfD and wants to punish Germany for its tolerance of Muslims – it really wasn't on my radar. “
The incident comes nearly eight years to the day since 12 people were killed and 49 injured in 2016 in Berlin's Breitscheidplatz when an Islamic State terrorist plowed a truck into a Christmas market.
Much remains unclear about al-Abdulmohsen and his motivation.
According to German media reports, the accused was born in the Saudi city of Hofuf and went to Germany in March 2006 to study. In July 2016 he was granted refugee status after claiming to have received death threats for leaving Islam.
Authorities say he worked as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist in Bernburg, a town of 32,000 between Halle and Magdeburg.
Spiegel Online reported that she was an activist who helped people – women in particular – to escape from Saudi Arabia and ran an Internet site that provided information about the German asylum system. In 2019 he gave an interview about his activities to two German newspapers where he expressed his hatred for Islam.
In another, he said he “broke” from religion in 1997.
“I found life in Saudi Arabia difficult, you have to pretend to be a Muslim and follow all the customs,” he said. “I knew I could no longer live in fear and when I realized that even anonymous activism was putting my life at risk as a former Saudi Muslim, I applied for asylum.”
In another, he said he wrote anti-Islamic posts on an online forum run by jailed activist Raif Badawi and subsequently received threats against his life.
“They wanted to “slaughter” me if I returned to Saudi Arabia,” he said. “It wouldn't make sense to risk coming back and being killed.”
In recent months, he has appeared to have given up on activism and adopted a more critical attitude toward the German authorities that fueled conspiracy theories often associated with the nationalist right.
In a post X in November setting out “the demands of the opposition to the freedom of Saudi” he called on Germany to “protect its borders from illegal immigration”.
“It became clear that Germany's open border policy was (former chancellor Angela) Merkel's plan to Islamize Europe,” he wrote. He also demanded that Germany repeal sections of the penal code that “limit . . . free speech” by “making it offensive (sic) to insult or belittle religious teachings or practices”.
His X profile features a machine gun and says “Germany is deporting Saudi women seeking asylum, inside and outside Germany, to destroy their lives”.
Earlier this month he was interviewed by an anti-Islamist blog and accused the German authorities of conducting a covert operation to hunt down Saudi ex-Muslims while providing sanctuary to Syrian jihadists.