This is what is known about the alleged perpetrator Taleb A

Doctor, activist, assassin?

What is known about the alleged perpetrator

Updated 12/21/2024 – 7:31 a.mReading time: 3 min.

Dozens of people were injured in an attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg. What is known so far about the suspected assassin.

According to information from security circles, the suspect arrested in Magdeburg was not yet known to the German authorities as an Islamist. According to initial findings, the man is said to be around 50 years old and comes from Saudi Arabia. He has been in Germany since 2006 and has an unlimited residence permit, said State Interior Minister Tamara Zieschang.

According to the current status of the investigation, it is believed to be a single perpetrator. The car in which the man drove “at least 400 meters above the Christmas market” into the crowd was still on site. It's supposed to be a BMW.

• Attack in Magdeburg: All developments in the news blog
• Magdeburg: Video shows the alleged perpetrator being arrested

The suspected perpetrator is said to be a doctor, said Saxony-Anhalt's Prime Minister Reiner Haseloff. The man comes from Bernburg, a city south of Magdeburg. Apparently there has already been a police operation in the area in connection with the attack, as the Magdeburger “Volksstimme” reports.

According to t-online information, it is said to be Taleb A., a specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy. He poses on various platforms as a human rights activist and part of a resistance movement against the regime in Saudi Arabia.

On Platform X he also sharply criticized the German federal government. “My experience is seven years in which the police, most recently in March 2024, have used dirty tactics against me as well as other critics of Islam to destroy our anti-Islam activism. The left are crazy. We need AFD to stop the police to protect,” he wrote on Platform X [Anm.: Rechtschreib- und Grammatikfehler aus dem Originalbeitrag übernommen].

Shortly before the attack in Magdeburg, he posted a post in which he accused the federal government of censoring victims of Arab regimes and not providing sufficient support. In the video on X he also made his home address public. According to information from the “Volksstimme”, there was a major police operation on the same street on Friday evening. In the clip, the doctor complained that he was not allowed to install a surveillance camera near his mailbox because a USB stick was stolen from it. In the video he also criticized the fact that he is not allowed to carry weapons.

Taleb A. had seen himself as a victim for months. “No Saudi liberal in Germany can protect himself from the crimes of the German authorities through peaceful means. A long series of crimes by the German authorities against Saudi liberals, some of which are published here,” he wrote on X. The German authorities, so explained He said in an article by the right-wing conservative American RAIR Foundation that they went to disturbing lengths to reject asylum applications from Saudi Arabia, ignoring “clear evidence of threats or inventing excuses to justify deportation.”

In an interview with the British BBC in 2019, he called himself an activist who wanted to help people from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region obtain asylum abroad. A. is said to have come to Germany in 2006 as a visiting doctor, shortly afterwards he renounced Islam and applied for asylum because he feared for his life, as he told the “Frankfurter Rundschau”. He was threatened with death for turning away from Islam. Taleb A. had also given interviews to German media in which he primarily denounced the persecution of women in Arab states.

Dozens of people were injured in the car attack on the Magdeburg Christmas market. There are “60 to 80 injured,” said the rescue service control center in Magdeburg on Friday evening. Several of them suffered serious injuries. At least two people, an adult and a small child, were killed in the attack. This was said by Saxony-Anhalt's Prime Minister Reiner Haseloff.

According to the Interior Ministry of Saxony-Anhalt, the authorities assume an attack. Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) and other top politicians were shocked.

The incident in Magdeburg occurred one day after the eighth anniversary of the Islamist truck attack on the Christmas market at Berlin's Breitscheidplatz. At that time, an Islamist perpetrator drove a semi-trailer into the crowd, killing twelve people and another dying years later from his serious injuries. The perpetrator was initially able to escape and was shot dead by police in Italy days later.