The Magdeburg Christmas market attacker had a long history of erratic and threatening behaviour that police routinely minimised and prosecutors studiously ignored

Flowers in front of St. John’s Church at the Magdeburg Christmas market.

Many new details about the biography and past criminal history of Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, the Magdeburg Christmas market attacker, have emerged in the past week. Unfortunately, I’ve been quite sick with some obnoxious respiratory virus, so my reporting has fallen behind, but I am determined to get this information out there. I apologise if this post lacks energy – I am typing it through a mild headache and serious exhaustion.

The dishonesty about al-Abdulmohsen and his motives has been staggering. While those on the German left are sparing no effort to portray the attacker as a right-wing terrorist and “AfD sympathiser,” loud voices on the right have spent days insisting that he was some kind of sleeper jihadist agent.

Neither is remotely true. All the evidence shows that al-Abdulmohsen was a paranoid, mentally unstable and professionally incompetent doctor with a long history of making terroristic threats to satisfy petty personal grievances. Anti-Islam statements from the AfD appealed to him, but beyond that al-Abdulmohsen had no developed political vision, and his self-styled refugee advocacy put him at odds with core elements of the AfD party platform. His entire internet presence is moreover uniformly anti-Islamic; all the tweets cited to support the argument that he was a crypto-Muslim are invariably misinterpreted or taken out of context.

The real story here is the failure of German police and immigration bureaucrats to do anything about this obviously unbalanced and dangerous man. In Germany, pensioners who call Green politicians “morons” get their houses raided by the police, while insane migrants who promise over and over to commit terrorist acts attract no attention. Authorities neglected to deport al-Abdulmohsen even after he overstayed his original visa, then granted and extended new residence permits despite his increasingly erratic behaviour. Al-Abdulmohsen received political asylum in 2016, two years after a court fined him for making terroristic threats. In 2023, as al-Abdulmohsen’s mental state deteriorated and his continuing threats brought him to the notice of the police again and again, he was granted permanent residence in Germany. As late as May of this year, he was even tweeting veiled threats directly at Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, and nobody did anything.

That is the executive summary. Here are the details:

Taleb al-Abdulmohsen was born to a Shiite family in Hofuf, Saudi Arabia, on 5 November 1974. He came to Germany in March 2006 to pursue specialist training in psychotherapy. He seems to have lived briefly in Hamburg, and from 2007 found himself pursuing research at the Hannover Medical School (MHH). He soon severed relations with the MHH, raising unspecified (and later “refuted”) “accusations” against his former associates.

Thereafter al-Abdulmohsen moved first to Düsseldorf; his legal status in Germany became irregular, but authorities refused to deport him and issued him a visa of tolerated stay in 2009. In July of that year, he moved to Bochum, where he worked at the Faculty of Psychology at the University there, and authorities issued him a regular educational visa.

In 2011 al-Abdulmohsen moved to Stralsund in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where he would stay until 2016, pursuing further specialist training. It is here that his legal troubles begin. Apparently angered that some part of his medical training was not being recognised, he threatened the state medical organisation of Meckleburg-Vorpommern on 17 April 2013 with an an act of retaliation that would attract international attention. He specifically referenced the Boston Marathon Bombing that had happened two days earlier. Police searched al-Abdulmohsen’s apartment and his electronic devices, but found no evidence of “concrete preparation for an attack.” In April 2014, the Rostock District Court fined al-Abdulmohsen 900 Euros for “disturbing public peace by threatening to commit a crime.”

In January 2014, al-Abdulmohsen appeared at the Stralsund local authority and demanded “financial support.” He once again threatened “to carry out an act that would be remembered for a long time,” and also said he might commit suicide. Police advised him to stop making statements like these, but no charges resulted. In October 2014, he complained to judicial authorities in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern about the Rostock ruling and insulted the responsible judges, and in September 2015 he called the Federal Chancellery to complain about the Rostock ruling. He said that the judges were racists and advised that he planned to get a gun. Authorities ignored him because he “was not considered a threat.”

Eventually and despite all of this bizarre chaos, al-Abdulmohsen passed his exams and became a certified specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy. In 2016 he moved to Halberstadt and applied for asylum, on the basis that he had left Islam and would face the death penalty for apostasy in his native Saudi Arabia. It was around this time that he opened his Twitter account and began his dubious career as an internet ex-Muslim. From the beginning, he complained that “The Muslims in the West receive enormous support,” while “ex-Muslims” like himself “receive little to no support” – a position that would evolve over the years to his final thesis that Germans were his enemy, because they were furthering the Islamisation of Europe. Also in 2016, al-Abdulmohsen posted a crowdfunding campaign to Indiegogo, where he asked for €96,138 (or, I guess, $100,000) to write a book on the “Creative Refutation of Islam.” He only raised €130 and as far as I can tell the book never appeared. Al-Abdulmohsen’s asylum status was officially recognised in July 2016.

One year later, al-Abdulmohsen came into contact with an organisation called Säkulare Flüchtlingshilfe or Atheist Refugee Relief (ARR). He originally considered cooperating with the ARR, but as I explained in the last post, he came to believe one of their employees was responsible for sexually abusing female refugees from Saudi Arabia. The issue soon became the dominant focus of his Twitter account, and the ARR took legal action against him for defamation. The case landed before a Cologne court in summer 2023, where the judges ruled against al-Abdulmohsen, ordering him to desist from making defamatory comments or face a fine of up to €250,000 or six months in prison. While the judges pronounced their verdict, al-Abdulmohsen succumbed to a “fit of rage and had to be escorted out of the building by security.” He appealed, and during appeal proceedings in October he again lost his mind. According to witness accounts, as it became clear to him that his legal prospects were poor, “he broke into a rage,” “pointed his finger at the judge,” and “said angrily that the German authorities would regret their decision.” Al-Abdulmohsen made additional threats on Twitter and directly to authorities, at one point declaring in an email to the Cologne Prosecutors’ Office that “I will have no bad conscience for the events that will happen in the next few days to restore justice.” Police admonished him repeatedly for his conduct but he was never charged.

Since 2020, al-Abdulmohsen has lived in Bernburg (Sachsen-Anhalt), where he worked as a doctor at the Bernburg Regional Hospital for Forensic Psychiatry. He treated involuntarily admitted drug addicts and headed three therapy wards. His colleagues report that he did his rounds alone and avoided social contact as much as possible. He soon earned the nickname “Dr. Google,” because he “had to look up every diagnosis on the internet.” Rumours circulated that he was not a real doctor; his German was so terrible that many patients could hardly understand him and his privileges to practice at a neighbouring clinic were suspended because he “repeatedly prescribed medication that could have put patients’ lives at risk.” In October, as his appeal in Cologne was turning sour, al-Abdulmohsen embarked upon an extended absence from his job via a combination of paid holiday leave and sick leave. His latest sick leave was schedule to expire on 20 December, the very day he carried out the attack in Magdeburg.

One final curiosity is worth mentioning: In February 2024, al-Abdulmohsen appeared at the Berlin-Tempelhof police station to file a police report. He made “confused statements” and became dissatisfied with the officers who were assisting him. Then he dialled the emergency number of the fire brigade, while still in the station, and demanded “legal advice” from the dispatcher. For this he was found guilty of “abuse of an emergency line” by the Berlin Tiergarten court and fined 600 Euros. He appealed the verdict, and his appeal was scheduled for a hearing on 19 December, the day before the Magdeburg attack. Al-Abdulmohsen did not appear in court and the appeal was dismissed.