The police are gradually lifting the veil on the profile of the victims and that of the suspect. The car-ramming attack on a Christmas market in Germany on Friday evening left five people dead and 200 injured. The people killed are a 9-year-old boy and four women aged 45, 52, 67 and 75, the police list in their latest report, communicated during the night from Saturday to Sunday. The toll could rise further, as around forty people are seriously injured.
Taleb Jawad al-Abdulmohsen, a 50-year-old psychiatrist, was remanded in custody on Saturday evening on five counts of murder, several attempted murders and several counts of grievous bodily harm. “On the evening of December 21, 2024, the judge ordered pre-trial detention. The accused was then taken to a correctional facility,” Magdeburg police said on their X account.
The Saudi suspect is an “Islamophobe” who did not hide his sympathies for the theses of the extreme right against Muslim immigration. Working as a psychiatrist in the region, he presented himself in an interview with AFP in 2022 as an “atheist”, which led him to flee his country where he claimed to have been “threatened with death for apostasy of the Islam.” It had evolved in recent years on social networks towards a radical discourse, mixed with conspiracy.
Saudi secret services warned Germany
In essence, Taleb Jawad al-Abdulmohsen continued to accuse Germany of not sufficiently protecting Saudis fleeing their country to escape a rigorous Islam, and on the other hand of welcoming radical Muslims from other countries with open arms.
“This is a psychologically disturbed person,” Taha al-Hajji of the Euro-Saudi Organization for Human Rights, based in Berlin, told AFP. According to the magazine Der Spiegel, the Saudi secret services had sent a warning to their German BND correspondents about him a year ago: in one of his tweets, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen threatened Germany with a “price” to pay for its treatment of Saudi refugees.
The warning remained a dead letter, while the man increasingly locked himself into conspiratorial and virulent speeches.
A “conspiracy psychopath”
Last August, he wrote again on his X account: “Is there a path to justice in Germany without blowing up a German embassy or randomly slitting the throats of German citizens? I have been looking for this peaceful path since January 2019 and I have not found it.” In 2013, he was fined for “disturbing public order” and “threats to commit crimes”.
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Even in the Saudi community exiled in Germany, the man was frightening. “We know him well, he terrorized us for years,” said the president of the Central Council of Former Muslims, Mina Ahadi. She called him a “psychopath adhering to the conspiratorial ideology of the ultra-right” who “hates not only Muslims, but all those who do not share his hatred”.
The German police did carry out a “risk assessment” concerning him last year, concluding however that he did not pose a “particular danger”, the daily Die Welt reported on Sunday.
The Saudi psychiatrist also seemed to be in permanent conflict with the German administration and justice. The day before the car-ramming attack, he did not attend a court summons in Berlin, where he was being prosecuted after causing a scene in a police station which did not want to register one of his complaints, according to sources. German media.
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