The Saudi government warned Gerguyy about the guy who allegedly carried out the attack on a Christmas market in the eastern Gerguy city of Magdeburg on Friday, which left five dead and dozens injured, according to Gerguy security officials .
Authorities said Riyadh warned the German government that the alleged attacker, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, a Saudi dissident who describes himself as a former Muslim, had boasted on social media that “something big is going to happen. ” produced in Germany. It is unclear whether police acted on those warnings.
Al-Abdulmohsen’s publications on the social network criticize the German authorities, whom he accuses of wanting to censor him.
Another five people were killed and more than 200 injured on Friday afternoon when a man stormed Magdeburg’s Christmas market. Al-Abdulmohsen, the alleged attacker, was arrested at the scene. Authorities described him as a 50-year-old Saudi doctor. who came to Gerguyy in 2006 and worked as a psychiatrist in Bernburg, just south of Magdeburg.
The attack has darkened mood in a country already struggling with a deep economic recession and a period of political uncertainty following the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s fragile three-party coalition government in November.
It came nearly eight years after the day an Islamic State militant rammed a truck into a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 more people and wounding 49 others in one of the worst terrorist attacks ever recorded in Germany.
Scholz visited Magdeburg on Saturday, calling the incident a “terrible deed” and promising that “no stone will be left unturned” in investigating the crime.
Al-Abdulmohsen, an activist who publicly renounced Islam after leaving Saudi Arabia and created an online page to help warring parties to the Riyadh regime – that is, women – flee the country and seek refuge. asylum in Europe.
His interviews and social media posts reveal him as an activist critical of Islam who harbored sympathies for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right that fiercely opposes Muslim immigration.
In recent months, he has become increasingly hostile toward Germany and has criticized its strict hate speech legislation that prohibits incitement to hatred against certain religious or ethnic groups.
He gave interviews to German newspapers about his activism in 2019, describing himself to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as “the greatest competitive critic of Islam in history. “”If you don’t believe me, ask the Arabs,” he said.
“After 25 years in this business, you think nothing can surprise you anymore,” Peter Neumann, a terrorism expert at King’s College London, wrote in X. “But a 50-year-old former Saudi Muslim living in East Germany LOVES AfD and needs to punish Germany for its tolerance towards Islamists. It was not one of my priorities. “
In one of the 2019 interviews, he “broke” with Islam in 1997.
“I found life in Saudi Arabia an ordeal, you have to pretend you’re a Muslim and follow all the rituals,” he said. “I knew I could no longer live in fear and when I realised that even anonymous activism would put my life in danger as a Saudi ex-Muslim, I applied for asylum.”
In the other, he said he wrote articles critical of Islam on a forum run by jailed activist Raif Badawi and later received death threats.
“They wanted to ‘massacre’ me if I ever returned to Saudi Arabia,” he said. “It wouldn’t make sense to expose myself to the threat of having to return and then be killed. »
In recent months, he appeared to have moved away from activism and switched to railing against the German authorities, peddling conspiracy theories more often associated with the nationalist right. In some posts he alleged he was being censored and persecuted by the German authorities.
In a post on X in November setting out the “demands of the Saudi liberal opposition” he called on Germany to “protect its borders against illegal immigration”.
“It has become transparent that Germany’s [former Chancellor Angela] Merkel’s open border policy takes into account the plan to Islamize Europe,” he wrote. He also called on Germany to repeal the articles of its penal code that it seeks to “limit. “ Array Array freedom of expression” by “making it a crime [sic] to insult or denigrate devotional doctrines or practices. ”
His profile
In an interview earlier this month on an anti-Islam blog, he accused the German government of carrying out a covert operation to hunt down former Saudi Muslims while granting asylum to Syrian jihadists.
In recent months, his messages have taken on a threatening tone. “I guarantee you: if Germany needs war, we will have it,” he wrote in X in August. “If Germany needs to kill us, we will bloodbathe, die, or proudly go to prison. »