A day after the tragedy at the Christmas market in Magdeburg, the big question has not yet been answered: why did he do it? Taleb A. is suspected of driving a rented BMW at high speed straight through the Christmas market on Friday evening, causing many victims. There have already been five deaths and hundreds of injuries; the exact number of victims is still uncertain. The authorities are calling it a ‘suspected attack’ and are still looking for a motive. The South German Zeitung reports that the authorities are looking, among other things, at the role of Islamophobia, but also at possible psychological factors.
Three minutes after Taleb A. allegedly launched his attack on the Christmas market, a message appears on his X account. In a collection of videos, he accuses Germany of persecuting Islam critics to “destroy their lives.” He also “is being persecuted,” he says, something that has not been confirmed by authorities.
Doctor and psychotherapist
Taleb A. lives in Bernburg, a city with approximately 32,000 inhabitants, 45 kilometers south of Magdeburg. The fifty-year-old man worked there as a doctor and psychotherapist in a hospital. A. grew up in Saudi Arabia, studied medicine in Riyadh and moved to Germany in 2006. There he specialized in psychiatry. He has had a permanent residence permit since 2016. He has appeared in the media in recent years, partly because of his help with asylum applications for women who want to leave their Islamic homeland. At the same time, he also advocates stricter border policy and calls on Germany to “close its borders to illegal immigration.”
The suspected perpetrator is “Islamophobic”, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said on Saturday. He has been critical of Islam and Sharia for years. Taleb A. expressed support for the far-right party AfD, which he said “can protect anti-Islam activists from the police”, and for Elon Musk, who he said is “unjustly classified as a radical right”. Screenshots of two X-messages in which A. calls PVV leader Geert Wilders a ‘true hero’ are circulating on social media. On his X account, the man writes that “Germany wants to Islamize Europe.”
‘Most aggressive critic’
As a young man in his twenties, he distanced himself from Islam, Taleb A. told the newspaper in 2019 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He told his friends that he no longer believed, as did a few family members and colleagues. But it remained a secret from his mother. Until he came out in 2016 under his own name, on his Twitter account. “My family hates me,” he told the newspaper, “because I can’t believe that a thief’s hand should be cut off.” In the interview with the FAZ he calls himself “the most aggressive critic of Islam in history.” Much of his criticism in that interview concerns Sharia law, on which the Saudi legal system is based. For example, he criticizes legal inequality for women.
The German newspaper interviewed him about the help he provides for people, especially women, who are seeking help with their asylum application. The BBC also made an item about his work. FAZ reposted the interview after the attack on the Christmas market, with the note that his recent statements seem to indicate “paranoid behavior”, but that, the newspaper says, “there were no indications of this yet” in 2019.
‘No asylum in Germany’
Taleb A. seems to have become convinced that Germany is actively opposing Saudi ex-Muslim refugees. The website that he has maintained since 2017 to help refugees with their asylum application has opened since December 2023 with: ‘My advice: do not apply for asylum in Germany’. Shortly before, in November 2023, another sentence preceded this: ‘Something big will happen in Germany’. A few months earlier, in September, Taleb A. spoke on his site of “Islamic crimes” that Germany would commit against the Saudi opposition. Those crimes, he writes, “will soon receive their punishment.”
Taleb A. explains this idea in a confusing interview that he gave on December 12 to the Rair Foundation USA, a right-wing online platform. He says he can prove that Germany is “actively trying to destroy the lives of Saudi ex-Muslims” in a systematic way, whether they are “inside or outside Germany, even if they do not even want to submit an asylum application.” It remains unclear in the interview what evidence he has for this, he does not mention any concrete examples.
Aid to refugees
On his website and on He founded a Telegram channel in 2023 in which he called for evidence to be collected against one of the board members.
The organization posted a statement on its website this Saturday in which it regrets the attack and distances itself from the man to avoid misunderstandings. Around or before 2019, the organization attempted to set up a collaboration with the suspect to support atheist refugees from Saudi Arabia. That collaboration “failed”, according to the organization. German media report that Taleb A. is a fairly isolated figure in the world of Saudi exiles. The refugee organization won a case they filed against Taleb A. in 2019 for libel and slander, the appeal has not yet been completed. In November, Taleb A. called for the organization to be banned.