Saudi Arabia warns Germany over man detained in connection with Magdeburg attack

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Saudi authorities have repeatedly warned Germany about a man suspected of carrying out an attack on a Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg on Friday that killed five people and injured dozens more, according to German security officials.

Officials said Riyadh warned German authorities that the suspected attacker, Taleb Abdulmosen, was a Saudi dissident and self-described ex-Muslim who had boasted on social media that “big things were going to happen in Germany.” It’s unclear whether police acted on the warning.

Abdelmosen, whose many posts on social media site He accused German authorities of trying to censor him.

A man broke into a Christmas market in Magdeburg on Friday night, killing five people and injuring more than 200 others. The suspected attacker, Al-Abdulmohsen, was arrested on the spot. Authorities described him as a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia who came to Germany in 2006 and had been working as a psychiatrist in Bernburg, south of Magdeburg.

The attack has soured the mood in a country already mired in a deep economic recession and political uncertainty since the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s shaky three-party coalition government last November. More bleak.

Nearly eight years ago today, an Islamic State militant rammed a truck into a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 people and injuring 49 others in one of Germany’s worst-ever terrorist attacks.

Scholz, who visited Magdeburg on Saturday, called the incident a “horrible act” and promised that “no effort will be spared” to investigate the crime.

Abdul Mohsen is an activist who publicly renounced Islam after leaving Saudi Arabia and created a website to help opponents of the Riyadh regime, especially women, flee the country and apply in Europe shelter.

His interviews and social media posts have shown him to be a radical critic of Islam and sympathetic to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which strongly opposes Muslim immigration.

He has become increasingly hostile to Germany in recent months and criticized its strict hate speech laws, which ban incitement against certain religious or racial groups.

In 2019, he gave extensive interviews to German newspapers about his activism, describing himself to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as “the most radical critic of Islam in history.” “If you don’t believe me, ask the Arabs,” he said.

Peter Neumann, a terrorism expert at King’s College London, wrote on the X website: “After 25 years in this industry, you think nothing can surprise you anymore.” East Germany loves the AfD , and want to punish Germany for its tolerance of Islamists – that’s really not on my radar.

In a 2019 interview, he said he had “left” Islam in 1997.

“I found life in Saudi Arabia to be an ordeal where you have to pretend to be a Muslim and follow all the rituals,” he said. “I knew I could no longer live in fear and when I realized that even anonymous activism would put my life at risk as a former Saudi Muslim, I applied for asylum.”

On the other hand, he said he received threats on his life after making posts critical of Islam on an internet forum run by jailed activist Raif Badawi.

“If I come back to Saudi Arabia, they want to ‘kill’ me,” he said. “There’s no point in putting yourself at risk of having to go back and be killed.”

In recent months, he has appeared to have abandoned his radicalism and instead blamed German authorities and peddled more conspiracy theories associated with the nationalist right. In some of his posts, he claimed he was censored and persecuted by German authorities.

In a November post on

“It’s clear that Germany’s open borders policy is [former chancellor Angela] Merkel’s plan to Islamize Europe,” he wrote. He also asked Germany to repeal parts of its criminal code that he claimed “restricted…” . . freedom of speech” by “criminalizing it” [sic] Insulting or belittling religious teachings or practices”.

His X profile featured machine guns and claimed that “Germany is hunting female Saudi Arabian asylum seekers inside and outside Germany to ruin their lives.”

Earlier this month, in an interview on an anti-Islam blog, he accused German authorities of conducting a covert operation to hunt down former Saudi Arabian Muslims while providing asylum to Syrian jihadists.

In recent months, his messages have taken on an increasingly threatening tone. “I promise you: if Germany wants war, we will start it,” he wrote on X in August. “If Germany wants to kill us, we will massacre them and either die or go to jail with pride.”