He Saudi refugee suspected of having run over to visitors of a christmas market in Magdeburg is noted “Islamophobic”who apparently could have acted out of “dissatisfaction” with the treatment of Germany to asylum seekers from their country.
The latest toll from the attack is five dead and 205 wounded, but it is still provisional, given that among the wounded there are about forty in serious condition.
The authorities began this Saturday to shed some light on the confusing motivations that led the suspect, a 50-year-old psychiatrist, to commit a “terrible act,” in the words of the head of the government, Olaf Scholz.
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The individual, identified as Taleb Jawad al Abdulmohsen, was arrested at the scene, along with the all-terrain unit that rammed the crowd gathered at the Christmas market for 400 meters.
The authorities ruled out any Islamist motivation.
“From what it seems, the background of the crime (…) could have been discontent with the way in which Saudi refugees are treated in Germany,” prosecutor Horst Walter Nopens told the press.
The German Interior Minister, Nancy Faeser, for her part, described the suspect, who has lived in Germany since 2006 and has had refugee status since 2016, as “Islamophobic”, in view of his public positions.
US President Joe Biden described the attack as a “despicable and dark event” and claimed to be in contact with German authorities.
Pope Francis “learned with dismay” about the attack and expressed in a telegram sent to the German president his understanding “for the pain of those affected,” said Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State.
An “atheist”
Al Abdulmohsen, who worked as a psychiatrist in Bernburg, near Magdeburg, defined himself in an interview with AFP in 2022 as an “atheist” and assured that for this reason he had to leave his country, where he had been “threatened with death for apostasy from Islam.”
In recent years, he maintained a radical discourse on social networks, peppered with plotting, without hiding his sympathies for the positions of the German extreme right against Muslim immigration.
He reproached the German authorities for not sufficiently protecting Saudis fleeing their country for religious or political reasons, even though they were generous with Muslim refugees from other Middle Eastern countries.
The suspect wrote in August on his X social media account: “Is there a path to justice in Germany without blowing up a German embassy or without randomly cutting the throats of German citizens? I have been looking for this peaceful path since January 2019 and I cannot find it.”
“He is a psychologically disturbed and excessively pretentious person,” Taha al Hajji, of the Euro-Saudi Human Rights Organization (ESOHR), based in Berlin, told AFP.
Scholz, of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), went to the scene of the tragedy on Saturday, where he called for national cohesion and promised to “act against those who want to sow hatred.”
Controversial politics
Scholz appeared in Magdeburg looking somber, dressed in black, and laid flowers outside a church in front of the Christmas market.
The chancellor urged Germans to “stay united” after the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party used the attack to denounce the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees to the country in recent years.
“When will this madness end?” Alice Weidel, co-president of the AfD, wrote on the social network
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Several Magdeburg residents expressed their anger and one of them urged Scholz to “dialogue with the AfD” about the refugee reception policy.
“When so many people come to our country, we have to be more vigilant. Now we pay the price,” said another resident, Michael Raarig, a 67-year-old engineer, who said he felt “sad and shocked.”
“I never thought this could happen in a provincial town in East Germany,” he said.
The attack, which occurred on Friday around 7:00 p.m. local time, comes eight years after the 2016 jihadist attack on a Berlin market, in which 12 people died.
EAM