The softly spoken psychiatrist was unfailingly polite in his brief exchanges with his neighbours. One called him ‘reserved but upright’.
Others assumed he was a decent sort too. Why else was he quoted in the liberal media as a humanitarian ‘activist’ who spoke out in support of female Saudi refugees fleeing oppression? But little about Dr Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen, 50, was quite as it seemed.
Alone in his ground-floor flat in the medieval German town of Bernburg, his patina of respectability soon faded along with his ready smile.
There, behind tightly drawn blinds, he worked long into the night on his computer, his ‘kaleidoscope of paranoiac views’ finding disturbing expression online.
Some of his tweets were incendiary and, with Germany struggling to make sense of Friday’s slaughter in Magdeburg, terrifyingly prophetic.
‘If Germany wants war, we will have it,’ he posted in August. ‘If Germany wants to kill us, we will slaughter them, die or proudly go to prison… Germany will pay the price.’
Dr Al-Abdulmohsen seemed to uncover conspiracy at every turn. The police were out to get him, he raged. Kill him, even. Though quite why was never exactly clear.
Elsewhere he expressed support for political groups such as Alternative for Germany (AfD) which has been accused of flirting with Nazi rhetoric. He also endorsed our own far-Right rabble-rouser, Tommy Robinson.
Several German media outlets identified the suspect as Taleb A (pictured), and reported that he was a specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy
Pictured: Taleb A the alleged car-ramming perpetrator that killed 5 and injured more than 200 in an attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, eastern Germany
Police officers secure the area during the German Chancellor’s visit to the scene of a vehicle-ramming attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg
Oblivious to all this, the neighbours in his apartment block were heartened by his professional status. However, some of his work colleagues at the Salus-Fachklinikum psychiatric facility thought otherwise.
According to court records, he ‘viciously attacked’ a colleague in 2018 but, strangely, the incident did not result in his dismissal.
And as the years passed and he grew increasingly angry with the German government and legal system, he continued to post vague but violent threats online.
Those in Germany’s Saudi community viewed him as ‘erratic’. One said there was ‘something wrong with his mind’. Someone else called him a ‘pariah’.
What eventually tipped this man of contradictions over the edge isn’t exactly clear, at least not yet. Just as little is known about his personal life. None of his neighbours had ever seen him with a partner ‘or in the company of anyone’.
But what is evident is that his catastrophic date with destiny was a long time coming – and that there were plenty of warnings along the way.
In the immediate aftermath of Friday’s attack it was assumed the perpetrator was an Islamist terrorist. The clues seemed obvious: the Christian target, the familiar attack method. We had been here before. Not just in Germany – where, in 2016, a Tunisian man with links to the Islamic State (ISIS) group, drove a truck into crowds gathered at a church market in Berlin – but also in Nice and London.
That the suspect turned out to be from Saudi Arabia only served to confirm the theory. Yet this man, who arrived in Germany in 2006 to study medicine, would confound us all.
Plush toys, candles and floral tributes lie near the site where a car drove into a crowd at a Magdeburg Christmas market
Mourners lit candles and placed flowers outside a church near the market on the cold and gloomy day
Debris and empty stalls are seen on a closed Christmas market one day after a car-ramming attack in Magdeburg
For one thing, he had long rejected Islam. And while he didn’t fall into the arms of the far-Right in any formal sense, he shared extremist sentiments, praising politicians for combating the ‘Islamisation’ of Europe.
In a five-minute audio message posted shortly before the Madgeburg attack, he said he held the German nation responsible for crimes including the killing of Socrates in 399 BC.
He also accused the authorities of stealing a USB stick from his post box and said he held ‘the Germans responsible for what I am facing’.
Threatened with deportation in 2015, Dr Al-Abdulmohsen claimed he was now an ex-Muslim and an atheist and convinced officials that if he was sent back to Saudi Arabia he would be executed for apostasy.
He set up an Arabic internet forum called wearesaudis.net, giving practical advice to the country’s dissidents, particularly, women, on how to claim asylum in Western countries.
On X, formerly Twitter, where he amassed 48,000 followers, he wrote widely about the horrors of Islamic countries, once posting a video of a woman being stoned to death.
The now-dissident doctor helped dozens of Saudi women reach the West. Usually they were fleeing because they had renounced Islam. Yet his good deeds became overtaken by concerns over his obsessive behaviour.
Yasmine Mohammed, a Canadian-Palestinian ex-Muslim human rights activist who is now living in Europe, exchanged messages with him.
he scene of a vehicle-ramming attack is cordoned off at the Christmas market
: A general view of the area, surrounded with police tape
Piled up clothes left behind at a cordoned off area at the scene of a vehicle-ramming attack
A barrier tape and police vehicles are seen in front of the entrance to the Christmas market in Magdeburg
Ms Mohammed told The Mail on Sunday that he complained about a German-based Saudi woman running an ‘atheist refuge’ for female asylum-seekers, accusing her of using the charity as a cover for a sex-trafficking ring.
‘He started obsessively talking to me about her, and sending me documents to prove his point. I was once married to a jihadi, so I know how misogynistic men behave, and he was like that,’ she said.
Ms Mohammed added: ‘I thought his behaviour was unstable. I eventually told him that if he has all this evidence, why doesn’t he go to the police. Eventually I told him not to contact me anymore and I blocked him.
‘The last contact I had with him was September. But seeing what I saw [in the reports from Madgeburg] just made me sick. He was an atheist and he was against
ISIS, but he launched an attack like ISIS. He attacked Christians in a Christian market. It does not make sense.’
The attack has also left security officials and experts puzzled. A security source said: ‘This guy was neither Islamist nor far-Right, which are areas agencies look at, so it would be hard to spot him. This is a highly unusual attack.’
British counter-terrorism police and experts have now invented a category for attackers like Dr Al-Abdulmohsen. They are described as those with ‘no fixed ideology.’
According to experts, these individuals are not committed to a fixed dogma like Islamists or far-Right groups. Instead, they absorb extremisms from different strands.
A security source said: ‘But the end result is always the same – violence.’
