Christmas market attack suspect was ‘quiet and introverted’
The man being held over the Magdeburg attack called himself ‘the most aggressive critic of Islam in history’, with his peculiar bundle of contradictions baffling terrorism experts.
It was a Christmas market like countless others across Germany and a quintessential part of the holiday season. On Friday evening, people thronged the narrow pedestrianised streets of the eastern city of Magdeburg, browsing among the wooden stalls in search of gifts, drinking Gluhwein and eating sausages.
Just after 7pm local time, the seasonal idyll was shattered when a BMW 4X4 careered through the narrow streets of the old town and ploughed straight into the crowds, travelling for 365 metres before being brought to a halt.
Thi Linh Chi Nguyen, a manicurist from Vietnam whose salon is in a mall across from the market, heard people screaming and saw a child thrown into the air by the car. “The number of injured people was overwhelming,” she said.
The vehicle’s journey took less than five minutes, but it was enough time to kill at least five people, including a nine-year-child, and injure 205, 41 of whom were last night (Saturday) in a critical condition.
At the wheel was a 50-year-old Saudi-born psychiatrist, who proclaimed himself “the most aggressive critic of Islam in history” and was named by German media as Taleb al-Abdulmohsen. He had arrived in Germany in 2006 and was granted asylum a decade later.
Horst Walter Nopens, a local prosecutor, said he still did not know for sure what had motivated the man, who was arrested by armed police minutes after the attack. But during questioning, the suspect - a critic of the Saudi government - had expressed dissatisfaction at the treatment of his compatriots, who like him had sought refuge in Germany. Police said he tested positive for drugs.
When news of the attack first broke, many people will have immediately assumed it was the work of an Islamist terrorist. Yet Abdulmohsen has instead been swiftly revealed as a bizarre bundle of contradictions that have baffled terrorism experts.
He had been working since March 2020 as a psychiatrist with criminals suffering from addiction problems at a correctional facility in Bernburg, a medieval town of 32,000 people that lies 50 kilometres south of Magdeburg.
In a statement the facility said “he has not been on duty since the end of October 2024 due to vacation and illness”.
“He was quiet and introverted,” said a female colleague, who attended regular work meetings with him. I’m shocked. It’s traumatising to think that I was sitting at a table with someone who did that. It’s incomprehensible.”
There was disbelief, too, among neighbours in the historic district of Bernburg, where he lived in a flat in a three-storey gabled block, which police were yesterday (Saturday) searching. “I might have said ‘good day’ to him on the street, but I didn’t know him,” said Sabrina Lippholdt, leaning out of her ground-floor window a few doors away and fighting back tears.
“He was inconspicuous. It makes me sick to my stomach to think about how he killed innocent people. I hope he stays locked up for the rest of his life and is punished for what he’s done to people, to young children. I just don’t understand it. We didn’t know what a sick person we had living among us.”
They also seemed unaware of their neighbour’s high media profile, which meant he was interviewed by mainstream news organisations - including the BBC. He also posted a prodigious amount of content on social media.
“I am the most aggressive critic of Islam in history,” he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. “That’s why I was threatened: They wanted to ‘slaughter’ me if I returned to Saudi Arabia. So I decided to apply for asylum in Germany. It would have made no sense to expose myself to the risk of having to return and then being killed.”
He set up a website as an information source for people in the Arab world who also wanted to renounce Islam, according to a video report posted on the BBC’s website in 2019. In it he calls himself an ex-Muslim who has helped hundreds of people flee the Gulf region.
He also posed as a supporter of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and as a critic of Olaf Scholz’s government. One post he shared contains a distorted photo of Scholz’s predecessor, Angela Merkel, holding a sign with the words “I destroyed Europe”.
In another post on Twitter/X in May in English, like the others in his full name, which has since been removed, he declared: “I seriously expect to die this year. Reason: I will bring justice at any cost. And German authorities are impeding all peacefull [sic] pathways to justice.
“If you are a concerned German citizen, you should demand justice now. If you are not concerned, then OK, but don’t complain later.” At the time, he also reportedly wrote in Arabic about the “realisation” of an “operation”.
In another on August 13, he posted in Arabic: “I assure you: If Germany wants war, we will have it. If Germany wants to kill us, we will slaughter them, die or go to prison with pride.”
Tim Rohn, head of investigations at Die Welt newspaper, tweeted Elon Musk, owner of X, demanding to know what action if any the platform had taken after a user reported the May post.
An unnamed user told the paper that other incendiary posts had been deleted after she reported them to X, however. She said it was “clear” that “he was becoming radicalised” and reproached herself for not having gone to the police.
In one newspaper interview in 2019, Abdulmohsen said he was an atheist who had turned away from the religion and had applied for asylum in Germany because he feared persecution in his home country as an unbeliever and critic of Islam. He gave more insights into his troubled psyche in multiple social media posts, in German and in Arabic as well as in English. On Friday evening, he posted videos in which he says in English: “I hold the German nation responsible for the killing of Socrates” and complained of being persecuted in Germany. “The government are criminals instead of protecting me,” he says later. “The police are the criminals. In this case, I blame the German nation and the German citizens.”
Germany has been shocked by the events of Friday night, which came just a day after the eighth anniversary of an even more deadly attack, when an unsuccessful asylum seeker from Tunisia drove a lorry into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people and injuring 56.
“There is no place that is happier and more peaceful than a Christmas market,” said Scholz, the chancellor, who, dressed entirely in black, laid a white rose at the Johanniskirche, a local church, in honour of the victims of Friday’s attack.
The latest incident comes as Germany faces a snap election in February after the collapse last month of the three-way coalition between Scholz’s Social Democrats, the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats. The poll is likely to be won by the rival Christian Democrats, whose leader, Friedrich Merz, is expected to become the next chancellor.
The campaign has been dominated by concerns over security and migration, and the attack has, predictably, been seized on by the far-right AfD, which lies in second place in the opinion polls.
Two hours after Scholz’s visit, Tino Chrupalla, the AfD’s co-leader, laid a wreath at the same church in front of the gathered media but declined to speak.
For some of the locals, it is clear where to pin the blame for the attack. “The worrying thing is that this man was intelligent, a doctor,” said Kai Mahn, 57. “This shows it’s just a problem with all of them” - clarifying that by “them” he meant Muslims. He said he was scared for his children, whom he called right after the attack to make sure they were safe.
The morning after the carnage the market lay abandoned in a ghostly silence, framed by towering grey clouds. “That’s my stall, the third one there, with the lights off,” said Manuela Volkner, pointing between a row of police vans, guarded by officers with machineguns.
Normally, Volkner would have been working at the market on Friday, but felt unwell and stayed home. The market will not open again this year.
The Times
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