BERLIN (Reuters) -Here is what we know so far about the man who was arrested as the suspected driver in a car-ramming attack on Friday at a Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg in which five people were killed and some 200 injured.
LIFE IN GERMANY
The suspect is a 50-year-old from Saudi Arabia with permanent residence status in Germany, where he has been living for almost two decades.
The suspect has not been named by authorities. Multiple German media reports refer to him as Taleb A.
The suspect had worked as a psychiatrist at a specialist rehabilitation clinic for criminals with addictions in Bernburg since March 2020. “Since the end of October 2024, he has been absent due to holiday and illness,” the facility said in a statement.
He lived on a quiet street near the centre of Bernburg, a town of 30,000, south of Magdeburg, in a three-storey apartment block.
MOTIVE UNCLEAR
German authorities said early on that the suspect was not known to authorities as an Islamist.
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser declined to comment on the suspect’s motives for the attack or political affiliations but said his Islamophobia was “clear to see”.
The local prosecutor in Magdeburg, Horst Nopens, said a possible factor in the attack may have been the suspect’s “dissatisfaction with the treatment of Saudi refugees in Germany” but added that the motive remained unclear.
According to broadcaster ZDF, the suspect was known to the relevant federal authorities at the beginning of 2015, at the latest, due to his possible intentions to carry out an attack.
INDICATION OF FAR-RIGHT SYMPATHIES
Taleb A. appeared in a number of media interviews in 2019 reporting on his activist work helping Saudi Arabians who had turned their back on Islam to flee to Europe.
In a BBC documentary from July 2019, the man speaks about founding the platform wearesaudis.net after he became an atheist and claimed asylum in Germany.
He is a fierce critic of Islam in these interviews, telling Germany’s FAZ newspaper in June that year: “There is no good Islam.”
His account on social media platform X, verified by Reuters, indicated support for the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD), as well as for U.S. billionaire Elon Musk, who has criticised German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and expressed support for the AfD.
In an X post at 7:09 pm on Friday, just minutes after the first emergency services calls about the attack, Taleb A. narrates several, often rambling, videos in which he makes a number of claims including that German police have tampered with his mail.
He draws a connection between the ancient Greeks’ execution of the philosopher Socrates “for his religion critique” and what Taleb A. said is Germany’s pursuit of critics of Islam.
The post is a reply to an earlier video he posted in August that complains that German police stole a USB stick from him and that Germany is censoring social media content.
(Reporting by Thomas Escritt in Magdeburg, Rachel More in BerlinEditing by Frances Kerry, William Maclean)
