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.
The suspect is a 50-year-old man from Saudi Arabia with permanent residence status in Germany, where he has been living for almost two decades. He has not been named by authorities, and 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. 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.
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.
The suspect 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, he spoke about founding the platform wearesaudis.net after he became an atheist and claimed asylum in Germany. He is a fierce critic of Islam, telling Germany’s FAZ newspaper in June 2019, “There is no good Islam.”
His social media account, 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 criticized German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and expressed support for the AfD.
