Interior Minister says the suspect was “clearly Islamophobic”, without giving further details about Friday night’s attack, which left at least five dead, including a child, and more than 200 injured. Der Spiegel says Saudi Arabia alerted German authorities three times about the suspect
Friday night’s attack on a busy Christmas market in Magdeburg, in eastern Germany, was allegedly carried out by a 50-year-old Saudi Arabian citizen, identified as Taleb A., who was in the crosshairs of his country’s authorities- Christmas and about which the German authorities will have received several warnings from the Saudi monarchy.
The news is being reported this Saturday by the German magazine Der Spiegel, which indicates that Saudi Arabia sent at least three warnings to the German authorities about Taleb A., a 50-year-old Saudi doctor who has lived in Germany since 2006 and to whom he was granted refugee status in 2016.
No further details are known about these warnings, with several German media talking about a man with “anti-Islam views”, as also mentioned by the German Minister of the Interior during a visit to the site of the attack.
Der Spiegel also reports that the suspect tried to collaborate with the Secular Refugee Aid Association to coordinate aid for atheist refugees from Saudi Arabia, a fact mentioned by the association itself in a statement in which it states that this partnership did not come to fruition.
Following this, “contact with the man was only maintained through lawyers and the courts”, after the association filed a complaint with the police in 2019 “following the most vile slander and verbal attacks made by him”, without having been possible “to find any reason that explains his smear campaign and the aggressiveness of his accusations”.
This complaint gave rise to legal action, which the former board members won at the Cologne Regional Court. Taleb A. was then ordered to delete the social media posts where he launched the attacks. “The case is still in the appeal phase at the Higher Regional Court in Cologne,” says the association.
Furthermore, the doctor in question was also the target of an investigation by the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office for “improper use of emergency calls”. The report to which the magazine had access reads that Taleb A. went to police station 44 in February 2024 to file a complaint against police officers on duty whose behavior left him dissatisfied.
The report indicates that A. “gave confusing information” and “called the firefighters’ emergency number while still at the station to ask for legal advice”, says the same publication.
For this “misuse” of the emergency number, the Saudi received 20 daily fines of 30 euros each, having appealed against this sentence. As a spokesperson for the Berlin MP confirmed to Der Spiegel, the appeal should have been judged on December 19, the day before the apparent attack in Magdeburg, but ended up being rejected due to the absence of Taleb A., who did not attend the audience.
Suspect was ‘clearly Islamophobic’
This Saturday morning, the death toll from the attack was updated to five dead and more than 200 injured, of which around 40 are in a very serious condition, confirmed German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Speaking to journalists, Scholz condemned the “terrible and insane act” that took place at the Christmas market, stressing that “there is no place more peaceful and joyful than a Christmas market”.
At his side, the governor of the state of Saxony-Anhalt, Reiner Haseloff, spoke of an “unimaginable incident”, confirming that the dimensions of the attack are worse than initially considered.
The Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, said that the suspect under arrest was “clearly Islamophobic”, declining to provide further details about Taleb A’s political and religious affiliation.
German authorities are still investigating Friday’s attack, which occurred at 8pm local time (7pm in Lisbon), when the suspect, who police say acted alone, drove a car into a huge crowd.
“What a terrible act it is to injure and kill so many people with such brutality,” Scholz said at the scene of the attack. “We now know that more than 200 people have been injured, five have died so far, a staggering number, and almost 40 are injured so seriously that we should be very worried for them.”
