Who is Taleb, the Magdeburg attacker: the anti-Islam Saudi psychiatrist

MAGDEBURG – They caught him a hundred meters from the massacre. The police stopped him at a tram stop, he lay down on the ground to be handcuffed. Taleb Al Abdulmohsen sat next to his rented BMW, calmly. But between the few seconds of the massacre and the capture, Taleb Al Abdulmohsen managed to post a couple of delirious videos that could be one of the keys to the Advent massacre that shocked Germany.

“I am persecuted by the Germans,” he claims in the videos. And in a post on X he writes that “Socrates was killed by the Greeks and no one paid. If justice is to be done, it should be to stop the Islamization of Europe.”

Retracing his biography backwards, through his intense activity on What emerges is the story of a landing in Germany that began auspiciously, as a perfectly integrated refugee, and of a biography that ended up astray due to a growing anti-Islamic fanaticism that had led the former refugee to embrace theses and leading figures of the far right contemporary, from Elon Musk ad Alice Weidelpassing through the leader of the Identitarians, Martin Sellner.

Born in 1974 in Hufuf, Saudi Arabia, Taleb Al Abdulmohsen arrived in Germany in 2016, after specializing in psychiatry. He begins working in the clinic in Bemburg, in Saxony-Anhalt, about fifty kilometers south of Magdeburg. And in those years, his profile seems that of an integrated and generous migrant: Al Abdulmohsen takes action for Saudi women who want to escape from the regime and “from the rapes of their male guardians”, as he told F in 2019rankfurter Review. “I am the most critical person of Islam in history,” he confesses to the German newspaper. Other interviews follow: major German newspapers, la Bbc.

At the time, Al Abdulmohsen still had faith in the German asylum system which “can give women freedom”. First of all to her fellow citizens oppressed by an Islamic monarchy. And he himself was granted refugee status in 2016 because he claims his total rejection of Islam has exposed him to death threats from fanatics. In the following years, however, something goes wrong.

Al Abdulmohsen begins to post increasingly longer, increasingly delirious videos. The psychiatrist seems to have lost faith in Germany and becomes radicalized. Su X increasingly attacks the country that hosts him, guilty of “hunting down Saudi refugees within the country and abroad to destroy their lives”. Claims that Germany wants to “Islamize Europe”, posts a photo of the former chancellor Angela Merkel with the writing in English “I have destroyed Europe”.

And a worm begins to eat his brain. That his fellow citizens are threatened by the German “authorities”, that Germany prefers “jihadists” to atheists like him. On anti-Islamic American sites he begins to ask for the borders to be closed. And his drift goes so far that he begins to sympathize with the far right, both German and global.

He likes the techno-sovereignist Elon Muskloves the German ultra-right of which he writes: “Who, if not the AfD, fights Islam?”. He feels comforted, in his visceral hatred against Muslims, even by the leader of the Identitarians, Martin Sellner. And to Alice Weidel, head of the AfD, Al Abdulmohsen writes directly on X: “The left is crazy, we need the AfD to protect the police.”

Does anyone notice those posts, those increasingly aggressive comments. According to German media, the Saudi authorities reported those growing delusions to Berlin. But no one acts. Not even when a machine gun appears next to Taleb Al Abdulmohsen's profile.