Islamabad – The Saudi authorities are currently working flat out to collate everything they have on the Magdeburg market suspect, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, and to share it with Germany’s ongoing investigation “in every way possible”.
Inside the imposing sand coloured and fortress-like walls of the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Riyadh there is a perhaps justifiable sense of pique.
The ministry previously warned the German government about al-Abdulmohsen’s extremist views.
It sent four Notes Verbal , three of them to Germany’s intelligence agencies and one to the foreign ministry in Berlin. Butt there was, the Saudis say, no response.
Taleb al-Abdulmohsen was granted asylum by Germany in 2016, one year after the former Chancellor Angela Merkel threw open her country’s borders to let in more than a million migrants from the Middle East, and 10 years after al-Abdulmohsen had taken up residence in Germany.
he was Born in the Saudi date palm oasis town of Hofuf in 1974, little is known about his early life before he decided to leave Saudi Arabia and move to Europe aged 32.
Active on social media, on his Twitter (later X) account he labels himself as both a psychiatrist and founder of a Saudi rights movement, together with the tag @SaudiExMuslims.
He founded a website aimed at helping Saudi women flee their country to Europe.
According to Saudi MoFA he was a people trafficker and the Ministry of Interior’s investigators, the Mabaatheth, are said to have an extensive file on him.
There is no question that the German authorities, both federal and state, have made some serious errors of omission in the case of al-Abdulmohsen.
Whatever their reasons for not responding, as the Saudis claim, to the repeated warnings about his extremism, he was seemingly a danger to his adopted host country.
There is also, separately, the failure to close off, or at least guard, the emergency access route to Magdeburg Alter Markt that allowed him to allegedly drive his BMW into the crowds.
German authorities have defended the market’s layout and said an investigation into the suspect’s past is ongoing.
BY: Nadeem Faisal Baiga
