Saudi physician suspected in Germany’ scar ramming attack on Christmas market was an atheist who held strong anti-Islam views and was angry with Germany’s migrant and asylum policy, officials said on Saturday.
Various German news sources identified the suspect as Taleb al-Abdulmohsen who appeared in a number of media interviews in 2019 reporting on his activist work helping Saudi Arabians who had turned their back on Islam to flee to Europe.
The suspect has resided in Germany for approximately 20 years, working as a doctor in Bernburg, situated about 40 kilometres from Magdeburg.
In an interview in July 2019, Taleb spoke about founding the platform wearesaudis.net after he became an atheist and claimed asylum in Germany.
He is a fierce critic of Islam in his past interviews, telling Germany’s FAZ newspaper: “There is no good Islam.”
Interior minister Nancy Fraser said he held “Islamophobic” views. And a prosecutor said that “the background to the crime… could have been disgruntlement with the way Saudi Arabian refugees are treated in Germany”.
Taha Al-Hajji of the Berlin-based European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights told AFP Abdulmohsen was “a psychologically disturbed person with an exaggerated sense of self-importance”.
Meanwhile, the death toll in the attack in Germany’s Magdeburg has risen to five people, and more than 200 have been seriously injured, as per Saxony-Anhalt’s Governor Reiner Haseloff.
Surveillance video footage of the attack showed a black BMW racing straight through the crowd, scattering bodies amid the festive stalls that were selling traditional handicrafts, snacks and mulled wine.
“As things stand, he is a lone perpetrator, so that as far as we know there is no further danger to the city. Every human life that has fallen victim to this attack is a terrible tragedy and one human life too many,” Saxony-Anhalt’s governor Reiner Haseloff said.
Germany has been hit by multiple deadly jihadist attacks, but evidence gathered by investigators and his past online posts painted a different picture of Abdulmohsen, a 50-year-old doctor of psychiatry.
On Saturday, Chancellor Scholz and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser visited Magdeburg, with a memorial service scheduled at the city cathedral that evening. Faeser directed federal buildings nationwide to lower their flags to half-staff.