The LEDs projecting snowflakes onto the facade of a building are all that remains of the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany. A car drove at speed into the crowd in the late evening of Friday 20 December, destroying everything, leaving dead and injured in its wake. An adult and a small child were killed, but there are other people in hospital in very serious conditions and over seventy injured. A few days before Christmas, Europe is rediscovering the fear of terrorist attacks. A man, a Saudi who lives permanently in Germany, was arrested. Who is he and what is at the origin of his gesture.
Who is the attacker of the Christmas markets in Magdeburg?
The man arrested for the Christmas market attack is Taleb Al Abdulmohsen, an anti-Islam activist. He fled Saudi Arabia as an atheist. He lives in Bernburg in the district of Salzland, has a permanent residence permit and works as a doctor in a private facility. According to Der Spiegel, he is a fan of Elon Musk and the US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, as well as the British right-wing activist Tommy Robinson.
He was not at all known for his sympathies towards the jihadist movement. On the contrary, explains AFP, he seems more like a man who feels persecuted, who has broken with Islam and on the contrary denounces the dangers of the Islamization of Germany. Some media even attribute links to the German far right. On X as a profile picture he has a stylized close-up of himself. On the cover, however, there is an enormous Ar-15, the American-made semi-automatic rifle known for being the most used in mass massacres in the United States. If the Islamist matrix was one of the hypotheses being examined by the investigators, reading his social channel very different ideas emerge. In the bio on
From what emerges, Al Abdulmohsen criticizes Germany because, in his opinion, it is excessively open to the culture and religion of its places of origin. The ones from which he, an atheist, ran away. After receiving asylum, Al Abdulmohsen founded the wearesaudis.net forum, which quickly became a point of reference for atheists who want to leave Muslim countries and this earned him a certain notoriety, so much so that his commitment was described in articles and interviews on media such as BBC or Al Jazeera.
“It is a catastrophe for Magdeburg and for Germany in general”, commented Reiner Haseloff, the president of the Saxony-Anhalt region, who confirmed the arrest of the fifty-year-old.
The attack in a video: the risky maneuvers and the SUV on the crowd
Images of a video shot by a video surveillance camera are circulating of the attack, which some German media reported without publishing. The black BMW hits dozens of people among the stalls. There is chaos all around: people on the ground, desperate crying, first aid. According to eyewitnesses, the car proceeded in a zig-zag for at least 400 metres, with the intention of overwhelming as many of those present as possible.
The shock is great and fears that have never completely disappeared are rekindled: only on Thursday 19 December did the Germans remember the attack on the Christmas market in Berlin, at Breitscheidplatz, where the Tunisian Anis Amir had attacked the crowd with a truck, killing 13 people, including the Italian Fabrizia di Lorenzo.
