Magdeburg Christmas Market Attack

Yesterday, a Saudi-born man named Taleb al-Abdulmohsen rented a black BMW sport utility vehicle and drove it into a crowd at the Christmas market in Magdeburg, killing five people and injuring more than 200. It is the second such attack in German history, following the 2016 Berlin truck attack by the unsuccessful Tunisian asylum seeker Anis Amri, exactly eight years and one day prior.

The assault was captured on surveillance video:

German police arrested al-Abdulmohsen almost immediately, near his smashed-up SUV. In this image the police have him at gunpoint and he lies face-down on the ground:

Al-Abdulmohsen is a 50 year-old psychiatrist and psychotherapist who lived in Bernburg, 46km south of Magdeburg. He first came to Germany from Saudi Arabia in March 2006, when he was granted political asylum. German authorities repeatedly refused Saudi Arabian requests that he be extradited. The Saudis accused him of terrorism and human trafficking, for alleged complicity with efforts to smuggle Arab girls to the European Union. Al-Abdulmohsen finally obtained refugee status and permanent residence in Germany in July 2016, and for years he has worked at a government clinic in Bernburg, where he has treated patients for problems with addiction.

Al-Abdulmohsen has a significant media profile. He gave interviews to Frankfurter Rundschau and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2019, in which he presented himself as an activist assisting refugees to Germany from the Arab world and as a staunch anti-Islamist. In the FAZ interview he even called himself “the most aggressive critic of Islam in history.” He also appeared in a brief BBC segment, where he described his efforts to help young Arab women emigrate to Europe while wearing a literal fedora:

Just eight days before the Magdeburg attack, on 12 December, he gave an extended video interview to an American organisation called the RAIR Foundation, in which he claimed (among other things) that Germany is working to Islamise Europe by welcoming jihadists, while neglecting the asylum applications and the needs of ex-Muslims like himself.

Prominent voices on the right of the political spectrum, assisted by some of al-Abdulmohsen’s acquaintances, collaborators and enemies in the German ex-Muslim community, are trying to construct al-Abdulmohsen as a jihadist sleeper agent. They obviously want to distance themselves and their cause from the Magdeburg attacker, but their arguments are not convincing.

At 7:07pm yesterday – three minutes after the 7:04 pm attack – al-Abdulmohsen posted four videos to his Twitter account in which he appears to expand upon his motivations. These videos frequently border on incoherence and suggest that the man suffers from paranoia and other psychiatric problems. He claims that Germans are like the Athenians who “a very long time ago … executed Socrates for his religional [sic] critique,” because Germans are “actively criminally chasing Islam critics to ruin their lives.” There follows a bizarre six-minute rant about a USB stick that he believes the Cologne police stole from his mailbox, and then finally remarks about his core grievance, which is related to a Cologne-based refugee organisation called Atheist Refugee Relief (ARR).

This is the story, as near as I can reconstruct it, from al Abdulmohsen’s obsessive and extremely tiresome thread:

Some years ago, female Saudi refugees to Germany, who left Islam because they were inspired by the work of Richard Dawkins (I swear I am not making this up), ended up in the hands of ARR, who housed them with a male employee whom these women accused of sexual harassment or abuse. Al-Abdulmohsen spent years demanding that German police investigate, and when nothing happened he developed a murderous rage, concluding that “the citizens of Germany” were collaborating to persecute ex-Muslim Arabs in service of a broader plot to Islamise Europe. That led him to make disturbing statements like this one:

As many Twitter users have noted, and as Welt is now reporting, a Saudi Arabian woman noticed al-Abdulmohsen’s threatening posts in September 2023, and went to considerable efforts to warn German authorities, repeatedly sending emails and text messages like this one:

This particular note was misaddressed and ended up in the inbox of a police department in Berlin, New Jersey. Other messages made their way to German authorities, who however mostly ignored them.

German federal police and police in Magdeburg conducted a “risk assessment” of al-Abdulmohsen last year, ultimately concluding that he posed “no concrete danger.”

As Welt and other German media have reported, the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office also charged al-Abdulmohsen for misuse of an emergency line earlier this year, after he called the fire brigade on 23 February for no reason. The Tiergarten District Court fined him 600 Euros; he appealed, but did not appear at his hearing on 19 December, one day before killed five people and injured more than two hundred at the Magdeburg Christmas market.