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Saudi authorities have repeatedly warned Germany about a man believed to have attacked a Christmas market in Magdeburg, East Germany, last Friday, killing five people and wounding dozens, according to a German security official.
Officials said Riyadh had warned German authorities that Saudi dissident Taleb al-Abdulmosen, who described himself as a former Muslim, had boasted on social media that “something big was going to happen in Germany.” It is unclear whether police acted on the warning.
Al-Abdulmohsen’s many posts on the social media site revealed.
A man rushed into a Christmas market in Magdeburg last Friday evening, killing five people and injuring more than 200 others. The suspected attacker, Al-Abdulmohsen, was arrested at the scene. Authorities described him as a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia who came to Germany in 2006 and was working as a psychiatrist in Bernburg, just south of Magdeburg.
The attacks have darkened the mood in a country struggling with a deep economic downturn and political uncertainty since the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s unstable three-party coalition government in November.
It comes nearly eight years after Islamic State (IS) militants plowed a truck into a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 people and wounding 49 in one of Germany’s worst terrorist attacks in history.
Scholz visited Magdeburg on Saturday, calling the incident a “horrible act” and promising “no stone will be left unturned” in the investigation into the crime.
Al-Abdulmohsen was an activist who publicly renounced Islam after leaving Saudi Arabia and created a website to help people, especially women, who opposed the Riyadh regime.
His interviews and social media posts reveal him to be a militant critic of Islam who has developed sympathy for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party that is fiercely opposed to Muslim immigration.
In recent months he has become increasingly hostile toward Germany, criticizing the country’s strict hate speech laws that ban incitement against specific religious or ethnic groups.
He gave an extensive interview to a German newspaper about his activities in 2019, and described himself as “the most aggressive critic of Islam in history” in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “If you don’t believe me, ask the Arabs,” he said.
Peter Neumann, a terrorism expert at King’s College London, wrote of “But the 50-year-old Saudi ex-Muslim says East Germany loves the AfD and wants to punish Germany for its tolerance of Islamists. “That didn’t catch my eye at all.”
In one of his 2019 interviews, he said he “broke off” from Islam in 1997.
“Life in Saudi Arabia was an ordeal. “I had to pretend to be Muslim and follow all the rituals,” he said. “I applied for asylum when I knew I could no longer live in fear and that even anonymous activity could put my life at risk as a Saudi Muslim.”
On the other hand, he said he posted criticism of Islam on an Internet forum run by jailed activist Raif Badawi and subsequently received threats to his life.
“They wanted to ‘murder’ me if I went back to Saudi Arabia,” he said. “It wouldn’t make sense to come back and expose myself to the risk of being killed.”
In recent months, he has shifted away from activism to criticism of German authorities and has been seen more frequently spreading conspiracy theories linked to the nationalist right. In some posts, he claimed that he was being censored and persecuted by German authorities.
In a post to
“Germany’s open border policy has become clear. [former chancellor Angela] “Merkel’s plan to Islamize Europe,” he wrote. He also demanded that Germany repeal provisions of its criminal code that he said were “restrictive.” . . Making ‘Freedom of Speech’ a ‘Crime’ [sic] “Insults or denigrates religious doctrine or practice.”
His
In an interview for an anti-Islam blog earlier this month, he accused German authorities of granting asylum to Syrian jihadists while also carrying out covert operations to track down Saudi ex-Muslims.
In recent months, his messages have taken on an increasingly threatening tone. “I assure you. “If Germany wants war, we will go to war,” he wrote in August X. “If the Germans want to kill us, we will massacre them, die or go to prison with pride.”
