The Magdeburg massacre: How the German authorities failed the murderer’s victims

The perpetrator of the Christmas market car attack was not an Islamist, but he had raised a forest of red flags that went unaddressed

At 19:02 on December 20, a man named Taleb al-Abdulmohsen started a monstrous terror attack in the eastern German city of Magdeburg. Within minutes he drove a powerful SUV through a tightly packed Christmas market, over about 400 meters and accelerating repeatedly. He did not “merely” ram his rented car into a crowd of families, he did it, in effect, repeatedly, displaying a revolting, persistent determination to cause as much death and injury as possible. His innocent victims had no chance to escape.

Neither, fortunately, had he. After his mass murder drive, his very robust vehicle was wrecked from the multiple impacts with much more fragile human bodies, another indicator of the ferocious violence of the attack. He had to stop and was quickly arrested. That al-Abdulmohsen was not shot on sight is both remarkable and a credit to the discipline and self-control of the German police officer who pursued and stopped him under conditions of extreme stress.

As of December 22, five of al-Abdulmohsen’s victims, including a child, had died, more than 200 were injured, over 40 “severely” or “very severely,” according to the local authorities. The killer’s actions are clear; their immediate consequences also. Everything else is unresolved; and much unsettled.

For one thing, especially because of a superficially similar attack in Berlin eight years ago, it was easy to jump to conclusions and assume that the Magdeburg mass murder was a case of radical Islamist terrorism. Yet it became clear quickly that this perpetrator had very different obsessions: al-Abdulmohsen, a 50-year-old psychiatrist and psychotherapist – of all things – has a long history of parading extreme hostility to Islam. And not, please note, just Islamism, a modern political ideology, but Islam, a very old religion, as such. A native of Saudi Arabia, al-Abdulmohsen abandoned his faith as a young man. Since 2006 he has lived in Germany. Having first arrived for medical training, he later received official asylum, based on his claim that his radical renunciation of Islam meant his life would be in danger in Saudi Arabia.

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Apart from his proud and public anti-Islam activism, al-Abdulmohsen’s own statements, mostly via X and in several interviews, reveal a confused, to put it mildly, view of the world. His clearly much less than stable mind features paranoia about the German state – the one that granted him asylum – because he believes it is engaged in “Islamicizing” Europe, somehow in cahoots with what al-Abdulmohsen has called a “Leftist Islamist alliance.” There also is admiration for the far-right/right-wing AfD (Alternative for Germany) party. He has ideas about individuals, too: It appears he likes Elon Musk and cannot stand Angela Merkel (for being too kind to Syrian refugees), for instance.

Yet it should be obvious that, in this case, one should not blame the objects of al-Abdulmohsen’s admiration for what clearly are the ravings of a delusional mind. As a German expert has plausibly surmised, al-Abdulmohsen seems to have “radicalized himself,” by concocting his very own ideology. That Musk – apparently falling for farfetched fantasies about the here irrelevant notion of “Taqiyya” – has been irresponsible enough to deny the fact that this was not an Islamist attack is a different, bad matter. It seems the omniscient tech billionaire cannot imagine there’s a kind of madness and terrorism that he hasn’t heard about. Hi Elon, if you read this: Calling al-Abdulmohsen a concealed “Islamist” makes about as much sense as fingering you as a closet Stalinist. Clear now?

The AfD has held a rally in Magdeburg, with shouts for deportation of migrants. Yet, in reality, what the case of al-Abdulmohsen certainly does not provide is ammunition for those Germans, or others, who love to blame everything and then some on migrants and migration. Perverse as this outcome is, this mass murderer – at first glance – would have appeared as an example of successful integration: well-educated, with a quintessentially middle-class/upper middle-class job as well as recognized asylum status, he professed, as Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports, sympathy for “Greater Israel,” that is, Israeli expansionism in all its staggering criminality and brutality. That degree of uncritical veneration for Israel is, alas, mainstream in Germany. Al-Abdulmohsen would precisely not have been deported.

Moreover, al-Abdulmohsen boasted of himself as “the most aggressive critic of Islam in history,” something that is, oddly, a bonus among many Westerners. Full disclosure: as a lapsed Roman-Catholic, with persistent sympathies for the Church, I myself have never understood why blanket hatred of religion is supposed to be some kind of modern civic virtue: Voltairianism is so 18th century. Al-Abdulmohsen, though, was repeatedly and sympathetically interviewed by mainstream media, such as the BBC and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung due to his activism that seemed to fit so well with concerns popular among Centrists and liberals in the West. Indeed, one hard question his case poses is why it is so easy to flatter so many “woke” Westerners with unrestrained, even cheap attacks on religion and in particular Islam.

As a perpetrator al-Abdulmohsen does not resemble Anis Amri, the Islamist murderer in the Berlin Christmas attack eight years ago, but instead a young man who went on a killing spree in a mall in Munich, also in 2016: Ali David Sonboly was an Iranian-German who committed suicide after murdering nine innocents, seven of whom were Muslims and four of Turkish origin. He was a loner, mentally deranged and frustrated, and fascinated by other mass shooter attacks. Politically, he hated migrants and felt attracted to racist far-right ideology to the point of boasting of sharing a birthday with Adolf Hitler. Sonboly seems to have seen himself as a successor to Norwegian far-right mass murderer Anders Breivik. In terms of religion, he made a point of refusing to be called “Ali” because it could make people think he was a Muslim. Indeed, like al-Abdulmohsen, Sonboly had grown up with Islam but then turned against it.

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The details of Sonboly’s case are important now as they show one simple, sad, and politically very explosive fact: In principle, German authorities did have some experience with a prominent case that foreshadowed important aspects of the Magdeburg massacre and its perpetrator al-Abdulmohsen. And, as is emerging now, when it is too late, there also were all too many signs that al-Abdulmohsen has long not only had but publicly displayed an extremely dark side.

This is not, in other words, a story about a bolt from the blue. This perpetrator could and should have been neutralized before he struck. On this issue, the arch-conservative British Telegraph got it right: This was “a security failure.” Here’s why we have to acknowledge that bitter truth: We now find out that al-Abdulmohsen has a long history of violent threats. Already more than ten years ago, in 2013, a German court sentenced him to a fine for “disturbing the public peace by threatening crimes.”

And the crimes he talked about then should have raised a forest of red flags never to be lowered again: Because of a fairly humdrum squabble with a professional association over the recognition of qualifications, al-Abdulmohsen threatened action that “would find international attention.” And no, he definitely didn’t mean a media campaign or a case at the European Court of Human Rights. How do we know? He referenced a massive terror attack that had just occurred in Boston, US. Just ask yourself: Quite apart from whether the threat is carried out (immediately, that is) or not, who – as in what kind of personality – reacts like that to a case of fairly everyday frustration? Exactly. It doesn’t take a profiler.

Only one year later, in 2014, he made similar if less specific threats again, leading to, in essence, a talking-to. In 2015, he mentioned acquiring a gun and taking revenge on the judges who had sentenced him two years before. And yet in 2016 he was granted asylum.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia sent repeated official warnings about al-Abdulmohsen to the German security services. They seem to have had no effect; they certainly did not evoke a sufficient response. Why? Who knows? Maybe Saudi communications were dismissed as political persecution, with not a single German official considering the possibility that they may also have been based on fact: even the persecuted can be real terrorists. If so, did no one juxtapose what the Saudis had to say with what al-Abdulmohsen was up to, very much in public, in Germany?

As late as one year ago, al-Abdulmohsen posted a threat to “make Germany pay a price” on X, where he had a large account with nearly 50,000 followers. That incident was investigated, but, somehow, the investigators failed to find a “specific threat.” Then, just over half a year before the attack, the future mass murderer, responded directly to an X post from the German minister of the interior, Nancy Faeser. On that occasion, al-Abdulmohsen declared it was “very probable” he would die this year “to establish justice.” In August, four months before he struck at Magdeburg, he posted: “I assure you that if Germany wants a war, we will fight it. If Germany wants to kill us, we will slaughter them, die, or go to prison with pride.” Finally, just over a week before his rampage through the Christmas market, the killer told an American podcast that Germany was after Saudi refugees and “actively destroying their lives.”

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Bear in mind that the above is a deliberately incomplete summary of the long list of warning signals that have now emerged about al-Abdulmohsen. And it is more likely than not that there will be further revelations. One way or the other, it is already an established fact that Germany will not only have to find out why Al Abdulmohsen chose to become a killer; that will be part of his trial. Germany will also have to face the urgent question of how he could possibly succeed in actually realizing his murderous fantasy.

At this point, German observers, for instance at the country’s most important center-conservative paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, note two “fatal patterns”: Despite his conspicuous behavior and even prior conviction, al-Abdulmohsen did not fit, in essence, the authorities’ preconceived – and all-too-narrow – ideas of what a truly dangerous extremist should look like. And, in addition, there just wasn’t enough urgency invested in his case.

And that kind of explanation, disturbing as it is, is still the least disconcerting on offer. On social media, some commentators have started speculating about some kind of double role al-Abdulmohsen may have played: Was he somehow, at least at some point, perhaps himself linked to security services? For instance, as an agent provocateur or an informant? And if so, whose? You may say there’s no evidence for this view. But, first, what do you expect in face of the genuinely unbelievable manner in which this terrorist who was not only in-the-making but simply could not shut up about it slipped through? And second, not leaving easily decodable evidence is, after all, what security services are good at. Conspiracy theory? Yes, for now. But we also do live in a world of very real conspiracies.

In any case, it’s campaigning season in Germany. Up until now, the AfD sticks out with its demagogic and entirely misleading labeling of al-Abdulmohsen as an “Islamist.” Yet, in general, Germany’s top politicians are treading, mostly, carefully. Not out of genuine piety, rest assured. It’s just that no one – except the raucous AfD – wants to be the first to be accused of exploiting this horror for political purposes. Yet that’s what they all will do. And, even if this may be counterintuitive and hard to acknowledge, ultimately that is a good thing. Because the worst possible outcome would be if Germany’s political elite came to a tacit understanding to protect each other by not making this enormous security failure a political issue. The victims do not call for false, self-serving “piety.” They deserve justice, with regard not only to al-Abdulmohsen, the murderer, but also those who failed to take him seriously enough to stop him.