The horror of a massive accident has once again shaken this weekend Germany. It happened this Friday afternoon in a Christmas market in the city of Magdeburglocated in the east of the country and which is the capital of the federal state of Saxony-Anhalt. Dozens of people are injured – at least 41 seriously injured and 78 minorly injured – and others four people have diedamong them a child, after a driver, already stopped, burst into the premises at full speed and carried away a crowd of people.
The authorities have already declared this event as an attackwhile investigate the motivations that led the attacker to commit the fatal attack, which occurred after 7:00 p.m. on Friday afternoon.
The detainee, who according to the Police acted alonethe car he was driving rammed into a crowd, a black bmw car with a Munich license plate, which he traveled at high speed for 400 meters the market, causing panic among those who were there, who tried to get to safety.
The perpetrator of the fatal accident has been identified as Taleb A.a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia, as confirmed by the governor of Saxony-Anhalt, Reiner Haseloff. The man I lived in Germany since 2006was recognized as a refugee in 2016 and currently had a permanent residence permit in that country.
Specifically, Taleb A. He worked as a doctor in a clinic in Bernburga town of 32,000 inhabitants located about 45 kilometers from Magdeburg, as a specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy, according to German media. It is in that small city where he lived and where a police operation took place at his home this Friday at the last minute.
In recent weeks, according to the local newspaper Magdeburger Zeitungthe detainee had missed work due to a medical leave.
Likewise, media such as Bild They point out that Taleb A. was not known or prominent as an Islamist. Quite the opposite: “I am the most aggressive critic of Islam of history,” he went on to say in an interview with the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2019.
His anti-islamist position would have been what led him to request refuge in the Central European country. “They threatened me: they wanted to massacre me if I returned to Saudi Arabia. So I decided to request asylum in Germany. It would not have made sense to expose myself to the risk of having to return and being killed,” said Taleb A. in that interview.
Furthermore, for years, the alleged perpetrator of the events advised women in Saudi Arabia as an activist, in particular, on the options for fleeing their country, the report states. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Bild also points out that on social networks, the detainee shared content that praised the German far-right party AfD and accused German rulers, such as former Chancellor Angela Merkel, of wanting to “Islamize Europe.”
In other social media messages, Taleb A. indicated that the AfD was the only party that fought Islam in Germany, and he wanted to found together with that party an academy for ex-Muslims in Germanyaccording to Der Spiegel.
Likewise, just a week ago an interview of his was broadcast through an Islamophobic blog in the US in which he maintained that the German state had a secret operation to persecute ex-Saudi Muslims around the world and at the same time granted asylum to Syrian jihadists.
At the moment it is unknown how the man was able to enter the market Christmas, right in the center and next to the Town Hall, given that German cities have reinforced the security of these places with bollards after the attack perpetrated in Berlin on December 19, 2016, claimed by the Islamic State, and in which 13 people died after being run over by a truck.