At least five people died and 200 injured in a car-ramming attack on Friday, December 20, at the Magdeburg Christmas market. The profile of the suspect arrested, a Saudi doctor living in Germany since 2006, continues to be questioned. Described as “Islamophobic” by the authorities, he has shared on numerous occasions his obsessions with German asylum policy.
Two days after the fatal attack on the Magdeburg market, the profile of the suspect, Taleb A., a Saudi doctor living in Germany since 2006, raises questions.
The crime of the fifty-year-old, placed in pre-trial detention this Saturday evening, December 21, “could have as a background a dissatisfaction with the way in which refugees from Saudi Arabia are treated in Germany”, declared to the press local prosecutor Horst Walter Nopens.
The Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, described the suspect 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.”
Extremely critical of German asylum policy
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.
Obsessions that he had developed during an interview given to the RAIR USA Foundation on December 12, which presents itself as “a grassroots activist organization made up of ordinary Americans at the head of a movement aimed at taking back our Republic to the network of individuals and organizations waging war on Americans, our Constitution, our borders, and our Judeo-Christian values.”
In this interview, the suspect presents himself as a person helping “former Muslim refugees fleeing persecution from Saudi Arabia”, in particular “Saudi women” to “help them obtain refugee status”. Presenting himself as “an ex-Muslim”, he is extremely virulent towards German asylum policy, “the only country in which an ex-Muslim can have his asylum application refused”.
“Germany welcomes Syrians even though many are not only Muslims, but Islamists, and at the same time rejects Saudis, many of whom, I know, are ex-Muslims,” he explains.
“I have evidence that Germany is trying to destroy the lives of ex-Saudi Muslims, even if they live outside Germany, and even if they have no intention of seeking asylum in Germany is trying to destroy their lives,” he adds.
“If they want to kill me, so be it.”
Taleb A. then continues with another of his conspiratorial obsessions: the so-called sexual abuse committed by the German authorities on Saudi refugees. “The German government commits crimes, such as sexual abuse, to force ex-Muslim Saudis to use drugs (…) Germany uses sexual abuse against Saudi refugees,” he says, presenting himself as the one who “reveals the truth” and says he is threatened as such by the authorities.
“If they want to kill me, too bad. They are trying to intimidate me and maybe they are really planning to do something,” points out the one who castigates the “silent Islamization of Germany” and for whom the “Left-wing people are the biggest criminals on this planet.”
Elise Phillipps with Fanny Rocher
