The suspected perpetrator of the Magdeburg Christmas market attack was reportedly an asylum seeker activist who was promoted by legacy media outlets, including the BBC.
UPDATE 1700: Prosecutors have announced that the suspect has been charged with five counts of murder and 200 counts of attempted murder with dangerous bodily harm. They revealed that one of the slain victims was a nine year old child and that 41 people were seriously injured and, therefore, the death count may continue to rise, Welt reports.
Senior public prosecutor Horst Walter Nopens said that the suspect acted alone and said of his motive: “According to the current situation, the background could have been dissatisfaction with the treatment of Saudi Arabian refugees in Germany.”
The original story continues as follows…
“Taleb A.” has been identified in the German press as the main suspect in the attack, in which a rented car was plowed into a crowd gathered for a Christmas market, leaving multiple dead and over 200 injured.
According to reports, the Saudi Arabian man arrived in Germany in 2006 after allegedly fleeing his homeland for fear of persecution for being an atheist. He was granted asylum in Germany in 2016 and had been living in the town of Bernburg — near Magdeburg — where he worked as a psychiatrist.
After moving to Germany, the suspect reportedly established a service to assist other asylum seekers move to Germany. For this work, he was profiled in “several media outlets from FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) to BBC to promote his mission for human rights in Saudi Arabia,” Welt reports.
The BBC noted in 2019 that he focussed on helping ex-Muslims flee from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region, with a particular focus on women.
In an interview with FAZ during the same year, Taleb proclaimed that he was “the most aggressive critic of Islam in history,” claiming that he was ostracized from the Muslim community in Germany over his atheism. In the article he also detailed his move to become a pro-asylum seeker activist in Germany.
An editor’s note attached to the article following him being identified as the suspected Magdeburg attacker, FAZ wrote: “This interview with Taleb Al A. was published in June 2019. Entries of the alleged assassin in the social media indicate that he has also been increasingly quarreling with Germany and its migration policy over the five and a half years since then. There are also signs of persecution delusions. Nothing of this was felt in 2019. Here is the unchanged wording of the conversation.”
Since then, Taleb A became increasingly critical of the German government and its migration agenda, accusing Berlin of promoting the “Islamization” of Europe. He appears to have been particularly angered over the acceptance rate of “Syrian jihadists” compared to ex-Muslims from Saudi Arabia.
While much media attention in the wake of the attack has focussed on statements Taleb made in support of the populist right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party over its critiques of Islamic immigration, he apparently considered himself to be a leftist.
“Taleb A. said in the interview that he was not a right-winger and described himself as a leftist,” Der Spiegel reports.
The German news magazine also reports that Berlin security agencies received three warnings from Saudi Arabia about the suspect. They were also warned following a 2023 post vowing “revenge” against Germany for supposed persecution of Saudi Arabian refugees and that the country would pay a “price”. However, officials allegedly dismissed the statements and reportedly did not consider him to be a threat as a potential extremist.
In another post in 2024 reported by Welt, he is claimed to have said: “I assure you: If Germany wants war, we will have it. If Germany wants to kill us, we will slaughter them, die or proudly go to prison. Because we have exhausted all peaceful means, we have only encountered more crimes from the police, the state security service, the public prosecutor’s office, the judiciary and the Ministry of the Interior. Peace is of no use to them.”
There are increasing suggestions that the suspect may have suffered from some form of mental illness, with German media describing his posts online as having been “confused”.
According to the BILD newspaper, a saliva drug test taken after the attack indicated that the suspect may have been intoxicated at the time of the attack. While it is currently unclear what drug he may have been on, the paper notes that the test scans for seven different drugs, including amphetamines, benzodiazepines, cannabis, cocaine, opiates, cocaine, and methamphetamines (MDMA, ecstasy).
At the time of this reporting, five people have died as a result of the attack and over 200 were left injured, many of whom seriously.
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