Saudis say warnings about market attack suspect were ignored

I’m told Saudi authorities are working flat out to gather everything they have on Magdeburg market suspect Taleb al-Abdulmohsen and share it with Germany’s ongoing investigation “in every way possible.”

Within the imposing, sand-colored, fortress-like walls of the Saudi Foreign Ministry in Riyadh there is a perhaps justifiable sense of resentment.

The ministry previously warned the German government about al-Abdulmohsen’s extremist views.

He sent four so-called “notes verbales”, three of them to the German intelligence services and one to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. The Saudis say there was no response.

Part of the explanation for this may lie in the fact that Taleb al-Abdulmohsen Germany granted him asylum in 2016, a year after the Former Chancellor Angela Merkel opened her country’s borders wide open. to let in more than a million immigrants from the Middle East, and 10 years after al-Abdulmohsen took up residence in Germany.

Coming from a country where Islam is the only religion allowed to be practiced in public, al-Abdulmohsen was a very unusual citizen.

He had turned his back on Islam, becoming a heretic in the eyes of many.

Born in 1974 in the Saudi city of Hofuf, an oasis of date palms, little is known about his early life before he decided to leave Saudi Arabia and move to Europe at the age of 32.

Active on social media, on his Twitter account (later X), he labels himself a psychiatrist and founder of the Saudi rights movement, along with the hashtag @SaudiExMuslims.

She founded a website aimed at helping Saudi women flee their country to Europe.

The Saudis say he was a people trafficker and Interior Ministry investigators, the Mabaatheth, are said to have an extensive file on him.

In recent years there have been reports of dissident Saudis being under hostile surveillance by Saudi government agents in Canada, the United States and Germany.

There is no doubt that German authorities, both federal and state, have made serious errors of omission in the al-Abdulmohsen case.

Whatever his reasons for not responding, as the Saudis claim, to repeated warnings about his extremism, he was clearly a danger to his adopted host country.

There is also, separately, the failure to close, or at least protect, the emergency access route to Magdeburg’s Alter Markt that allowed him to allegedly drive his BMW into the crowd.

The German authorities have defended market design and said an investigation into the suspect’s past is underway.

But a complicating factor is that Saudi Arabia, although considered a friend and ally of the West, has a poor human rights record.

Until June 2018 Saudi women banned from driving and even those women who publicly called for the ban to be lifted before then have been persecuted and imprisoned.

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is barely 30, is immensely popular in his own country.

While Western leaders largely distanced themselves from him after his alleged involvement in the gruesome The murder of Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. The murder of Jamal Khashoggi inAlthough the crown prince denies it, at home his star continues to rise.

Under his de facto rule, Saudi public life has been transformed for the better: men and women are allowed to associate freely and cinemas are reopened, along with large, spectacular sporting and entertainment events, and even concerts performed by Western artists such as David Guetta and the Black Eyed Peas.

But there is a paradox here.

While Saudi public life has flourished, there has been a simultaneous crackdown on anything that even hints at greater political or religious freedom.

Harsh prison sentences of 10 years or more have been handed down for simple tweets.

No one is even allowed to question the way the country is run.

In this context, Germany seems to have dropped the ball with Taleb al-Abdulmohsen.