{"id":55037,"date":"2024-12-21T11:43:59","date_gmt":"2024-12-21T11:43:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/prosfunds.com\/?p=55037"},"modified":"2024-12-21T11:44:00","modified_gmt":"2024-12-21T11:44:00","slug":"anti-islam-saudi-immigrant-held-over-magdeburg-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prosfunds.com\/?p=55037","title":{"rendered":"Anti-Islam Saudi immigrant held over Magdeburg attack"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free<\/p>\n<p class=\"article__content-sign-up-topic-description\"><span>Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe class=\"article__content-sign-up-iframe close\" scrolling=\"no\" id=\"signUpIframe\" data-prev-url=\"\/register\/in-article-sign-up?ft-content-uuid=5e2f3cd2-0a8f-4ac8-9afa-ca3d892d55f7\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<div id=\"article-body\">\n<p>The man who allegedly drove into a crowd of people at a Christmas market in the east German city of Magdeburg on Friday evening, killing four people, is a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia who came to Germany in 2006, according to authorities.<\/p>\n<p>Reiner Haseloff, prime minister of the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, said the alleged perpetrator, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, was not known to the police as an Islamist.<\/p>\n<p>Al-Abdulmohsen\u2019s profile on social media site X indicates that he is a fierce critic of Islam. <\/p>\n<p>German media reported that he is an activist who helped opponents of the regime in Saudi Arabia to flee the country and apply for asylum in Europe. <\/p>\n<p>Abdulmohsen allegedly drove his black BMW X5 into the Christmas market in central Magdeburg shortly after 7pm on Friday evening, knocking over dozens of people before being arrested by police.<\/p>\n<p>A video on social media showed officers surrounding him at a tram stop. He was seen lying on the ground next to his vehicle, a rented car with Munich number-plates, and later being led away for questioning.<\/p>\n<p>Authorities in Saxony-Anhalt said four people died in the attack and more than 200 people were injured, 41 severely. Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited the scene of the attack on Saturday.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is a catastrophe for the city of Magdeburg and for the region and generally for Germany,\u201d said Haseloff.<\/p>\n<p>Since the incident, a number of interviews with the alleged perpetrator have resurfaced, including one in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 2019 in which he described himself as \u201cthe most aggressive critic of Islam in history\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>He has also expressed admiration for Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right, anti-immigration party which is polling second behind the centre-right CDU\/CSU bloc ahead of Germany\u2019s national elections in February, and accused Germany of not doing enough to fight Islamism.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAfter 25 years in this business, you think nothing could surprise you any more,\u201d wrote Peter Neumann, an expert in terrorism at King\u2019s College, London, on X. \u201cBut a 50-year-old Saudi ex-Muslim who lives in East Germany, loves the AfD and wants to punish Germany for its tolerance towards Islamists \u2014 that really wasn\u2019t on my radar.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The incident comes almost eight years to the day since 12 people were killed and 49 injured in 2016 on Berlin\u2019s Breitscheidplatz when an Islamic State terrorist ploughed a truck into a Christmas market.<\/p>\n<p>Much remains unclear about al-Abdulmohsen and his possible motivation.<\/p>\n<p>According to German media reports, the alleged attacker was born in the Saudi city of Hofuf and came to Germany in March 2006 to study. In July 2016 he was given refugee status after claiming he had received death threats for turning away from Islam.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Authorities said he worked as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist in Bernburg, a town of 32,000 between Halle and Magdeburg.<\/p>\n<p>Spiegel Online reported that he was an activist who helped people \u2014 women in particular \u2014 to flee Saudi Arabia and ran an Internet site providing information about the German asylum system. In 2019 he gave interviews about his activities to two German newspapers in which he expressed his hatred for Islam.<\/p>\n<p>In one, he said he had \u201cbroken away\u201d from the religion in 1997.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI found life in Saudi Arabia an ordeal, you have to pretend you\u2019re a Muslim and follow all the rituals,\u201d he said. \u201cI knew I could no longer live in fear and when I realised that even anonymous activism would put my life in danger as a Saudi ex-Muslim, I applied for asylum.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the other, he said he had written posts criticising Islam in an internet forum run by the jailed activist Raif Badawi and subsequently received threats to his life. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey wanted to \u201cslaughter\u201d me if I ever returned to Saudi Arabia,\u201d he said. \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t have made any sense to expose myself to the risk of having to return and then be killed.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In recent months, he appeared to have moved away from activism and adopted a highly critical attitude to the German authorities that fed off conspiracy theories more often associated with the nationalist right.<\/p>\n<p>In a post on X in November setting out the \u201cdemands of the Saudi liberal opposition\u201d he called on Germany to \u201cprotect its borders against illegal immigration\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt has become evident that Germany\u2019s open borders policy was [former chancellor Angela] Merkel\u2019s plan to Islamise Europe,\u201d he wrote. He also demanded Germany repeal sections of its penal code that he claims \u201climit\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009free speech\u201d by \u201cmaking it an offense [sic] to insult or belittle religious doctrines or practices\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>His X profile features a machine gun and claims \u201cGermany chases female Saudi asylum seekers, inside and outside Germany, to destroy their lives\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Earlier this month he was interviewed by an anti-Islam blog and accused the German authorities of carrying out a covert operation to hunt down Saudi ex-Muslims while granting asylum to Syrian jihadis.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Read the full article <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/5e2f3cd2-0a8f-4ac8-9afa-ca3d892d55f7\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" rel=\"nofollow\">here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The man who allegedly drove into a crowd of people at a Christmas market in the east German city of Magdeburg on Friday evening, killing four people, is a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia who [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":55038,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-55037","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Anti-Islam Saudi immigrant held over Magdeburg attack | Prosfunds<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The man who allegedly drove\" \/>\n<meta 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