On the evening of Saturday December 21, Taleb A. was placed in pre-trial detention for “murder”, “attempted murder” and “serious assault”.
The suspect in the car-ramming attack on the market in Magdeburg, Germany, was placed in pre-trial detention this Saturday, December 21 evening, as announced by the local police.
“On the evening of December 21, 2024, the responsible judge ordered pre-trial detention. The accused was then taken to a correctional facility,” the police wrote on X.
The police specify that the suspect, Taleb A., a 50-year-old Saudi doctor who has lived in Germany since 2006, was imprisoned “on five counts of murder, several attempted murders and several counts of serious bodily injury.”
At least five people died, and 200 were injured. The victims are aged 9, 45, 52, 67 and 75 years old, police said.
Radical and “Islamophobic” discourse
The German authorities began on Saturday to shed light on the motivations, which were still unclear.
The crime “could have as a background dissatisfaction with the way refugees from Saudi Arabia are treated in Germany,” local prosecutor Horst Walter Nopens told reporters.
At the same time, the Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, described the suspect, a 50-year-old Saudi doctor who had himself taken refuge in Germany since 2006 and was arrested Friday evening at the scene of the tragedy in his car, as “Islamophobic” , in view of his public positions.
Taleb A., working as a psychiatrist in the region, presented himself in an interview with AFP in 2022 as “atheist”, which led him to flee his country where he claimed to have been “threatened with death for apostasy of Islam.”
He had evolved in recent years on social networks towards a radical discourse, mixed with conspiracy, not hiding his sympathies for the theses of the extreme right against Muslim immigration.
In essence, he criticized the German authorities for not sufficiently protecting Saudis fleeing their country for religious or political reasons, and for being, conversely, generous towards Muslim refugees from the Middle East.
