Saudi Arabia has warned Germany about a man arrested in connection with the Magdeburg attack

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Saudi authorities have repeatedly warned Germany about the man who allegedly carried out Friday’s attack on a Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg that left five dead and dozens wounded, according to security officials. of Germany.

Officials said Riyadh alerted German authorities that the suspected attacker, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, a self-described former Muslim Saudi dissident, had boasted on social media that “there is something big will happen in Germany”. It was unclear whether the police ever acted on the warnings.

Al-Abdulmohsen’s numerous accounts on the X website reveal him as a virulent critic of Islam who has railed against Muslim immigration into Europe and in recent months has shown growing hostility. to the German authorities, whom he accuses of trying to stop him.

Five people died and more than 200 were injured on Friday evening when a man attacked a Christmas market in Magdeburg. Al-Abdulmohsen, the suspected attacker, was arrested at the scene. Authorities described him as a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia who came to Germany in 2006 and had been working as a psychiatrist in Bernburg, south of Magdeburg.

The attack has darkened sentiment in a country already struggling with a deep recession and a phase of political instability following the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition government in November.

It came nearly eight years to the day after an Islamic State fighter plowed a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 and wounding 49 in one of the attacks. Germany’s worst terrorism.

Scholz visited Magdeburg on Saturday, calling the incident “a terrible act” and promising that “no stone will be left unturned” to investigate the crime.

Al-Abdulmohsen was an activist who publicly renounced Islam after leaving Saudi Arabia and created a website to help dissidents of the Riyadh regime – mainly women – flee the country and apply for asylum in Europe.

His interviews and social media posts reveal him as a fierce critic of Islam who has encouraged sympathy for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party opposed to Muslim immigration.

In recent months he has become increasingly hostile to Germany, criticizing its strict hate speech laws that prohibit incitement to certain religious or ethnic groups.

He has given numerous interviews to German newspapers about his activism in 2019, describing himself to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as “the fiercest critic of Islam in history”. He said: “If you don’t believe me, ask the Arabs.”

“After 25 years in this business, you’d think nothing could surprise you,” wrote Peter Neumann, a terrorism expert at King’s College, London, about X. “But another a 50-year-old former Saudi Muslim who lives there. East Germany, likes the AfD and wants to punish Germany for its tolerance of Muslims – that was not on my radar.

In one of the interviews in 2019, he said that he had “broken off” from Islam in 1997.

He said: “I found life in Saudi Arabia to be a test, you have to pretend to be a Muslim and follow all the customs. “I knew I could no longer remain in fear and when I realized that even an anonymous operation could endanger my life as a former Saudi Muslim, I applied for asylum. “

In one, he says he wrote anti-Islamic articles on an Internet forum run by jailed activist Raif Badawi and subsequently received threats on his life.

He said: “They wanted to ‘kill’ me if I return to Saudi Arabia.” It wouldn’t make sense to risk returning and being killed.

In recent months, he appeared to have abandoned activism and turned to insulting the German authorities, peddling conspiracy theories often linked to the right to citizenship. In some places he said he was being investigated and persecuted by the German authorities.

In a post X in November explaining “the demands of the opposition to the freedom of Saudi” he asked Germany to “protect its borders against illegal immigrants”.

He wrote: “It is now clear that Germany’s open borders policy was (former chancellor Angela) Merkel’s plan to Islamise Europe. She also demanded that Germany scrap parts of Its penal laws, he says, “limit . . . free speech” by “making it offensive (sic) to blaspheme or denigrate religious teachings.”

His position X has a machine gun and he says “Germany is chasing women who seek Saudi asylum, inside and outside Germany, to destroy their lives”.

In an interview earlier this month on an anti-Islam blog he accused German authorities of conducting a secret operation to hunt down ex-Muslims in Saudi Arabia while providing asylum to Syrian jihadists.

In recent months his messages have taken on an increasingly alarming tone. “I assure you: if Germany wants war, we will have it,” he wrote in X in August. If Germany wants to kill us, we will kill her, die or go to jail with pride.