The suspected perpetrator of a lethal ramming at a Christmas market within the German metropolis of Magdeburg on Friday is a 50-year-old Saudi refugee from a Shiite household who declared himself an atheist and “anti-Islam”.
Taleb Jawad al-Abdulmohsen had been residing in Germany since 2006 and practised as a psychiatrist within the city of Bernburg, close to Magdeburg. He had no identified hyperlinks to jihadists.
Abdulmohsen was arrested within the automotive used for the assault, and is suspected of intentionally ploughing into the group of Christmas revellers in northern Germany on Friday night time, killing 5 and injuring greater than 200.
The ramming got here eight years to the day after an identical assault on a Christmas market in Berlin that killed 13 individuals.
The authorities in Germany mentioned the date was not a coincidence, though they haven’t mentioned it was an Islamist assault.
On social media, Abdulmohsen portrayed himself as a sufferer of persecution who had renounced Islam and decried what he mentioned was the Islamisation of Germany.
He got here from a Shiite household within the village of Hofuf within the predominantly Shiite province of al-Ahsa, within the east of Saudi Arabia.
He arrived in Germany in 2006 and was granted refugee standing 10 years later, based on German media and a Saudi activist.
Abdulmohsen lived and labored within the area of Saxony-Anhalt, whose capital Magdeburg is 130 kilometres (80 miles) west of Berlin.
In an interview with the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau a number of years in the past, he mentioned he had been threatened with demise for apostasy.
In an unpublished interview with AFP from 2022 for an unrelated story, Abdulmohsen introduced himself as “a Saudi atheist”, and mentioned that younger Saudis weren’t solely fleeing the federal government however “are fleeing Islam”.
“Strict Islamic upbringing is the reason for all the issues of Muslims, particularly ladies,” he mentioned.
Some media retailers have reported hyperlinks between Abdulmohsen and the far-right in Germany. He was well-known within the Saudi diaspora within the nation and helped asylum seekers, notably ladies.
“He’s a psychologically disturbed individual with an exaggerated sense of self-importance,” Taha Al-Hajji, authorized director of the Berlin-based European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights, informed AFP.
“That is positively not an Islamist-motivated assault,” he added.
Hajji mentioned Abdulmohsen was “a pariah” among the many Saudi group in Germany, regardless of his work with asylum seekers.
Final August, he posted on social media: “Is there a path to justice in Germany with out blowing up a German embassy or randomly slaughtering German residents? I’ve been in search of a peaceable path since January 2019 and haven’t discovered it. If anybody is aware of it, please let me know.”
Within the submit, he condemned what he known as “the crimes dedicated by Germany in opposition to Saudi refugees and the obstruction of justice, regardless of how a lot proof was introduced to them”.
