Rival protests took to the streets of Magdeburg on Monday evening, which had been the scene of an apparent terrorist attack last week, allegedly by a Saudi Arabian who is now known to have been convicted of threatening attacks in the past.
The leader of Alternative for Germany (AfD), Alice Weidel addressed a rally of supporters at the Cathedral Square, Magdeburg on Monday night, telling those present asylum seekers who seek to kill Germans should be deported. Germany should not allow repeats of Friday’s attack, in which a car allegedly driven by a Saudi Arabian refugee was ploughed through crowds at the town’s Christmas market.
At least five people were killed and 200 injured, many of them critically when a high performance rental car was driven through the market at speed. Among the victims killed was nine-year-old André Gleissner. Four women aged between 45 and 75 were killed.
At the same time as Weidel’s AfD meeting, a counter-protest met streets away, proclaiming “don’t give hate a chance” and accusing the AfD of attempting to appropriate the attack for political gain, despite warnings about the dangers of mass migration being central to the party’s whole message.
The main suspect in the attack is 50-year-old Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, a migrant from Saudi Arabia who arrived in Germany in 2006. Initially a work migrant who had a scholarship from the Saudi government to study medicine in Germany, it is claimed al-Abdulmohsen later became critical of his home nation and denounced Islam.
Fresh details about the time al-Abdulmohsen spent in Germany have emerged since the attack he is alleged to have authored, calling the judgement of the German state seriously into question, given the decisions made apparently in the face of warnings and alarming behavior.
As now revealed by German newspaper Die Welt, even before al-Abdulmohsen was granted asylum status and given leave to remain in the country he exhibited erratic behaivour, and was convicted for disturbing the peace” over apparent terroristic threats made in 2013.
It is reported al-Abdulmohsen had been in the process of getting his certifications to practice medicine in Germany and was applying for professional examination at the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Medical Association, but upon being told he needed to submit additional documents, he handed the organisation a deadline to comply with his demands and a threat. Court documents unearthed from his 2014 prosecution states he told the medical association that “something bad with international significance” would happen to them, adding: “Have you seen the pictures from Boston? Things like that happen here too”.
This apparent threat was made by al-Abdulmohsen just days after the Boston Marathon Bombing and, consequently, the police were called. In court, al-Abdulmohsen insisted he had been under a lot of pressure because of his situation with Saudi Arabia, and claimed he only meant to threaten negative newspaper stories about the organisation, not an actual terrorist attack.
Further, he accused the medical association staff of assuming he meant an actual terror attack because they were prejudiced against Arabs.
The judge rejected this and said, it was reported, al-Abdulmohsen had an “above-average command of the German language and had an extensive vocabulary” and consequently would well understand how his words would be taken by others. The then-trainee doctor rejected the finding of the court, refused to accept responsibility, and even tried to take the legal officials involved to court, it is stated.
Remarkably despite this run-in with the law, al-Abdulmohsen was later granted a licence to practice medicine as a psychiatrist in Germany, and was granted asylum status in 2016.
A growing catalogue of other signs to the authorities is now being established, including people encountering him professionally finding his work as a psychiatrist so slapdash they questioned whether he really had medical qualifications, dubbing him “Dr Google”. In other cases, several individuals and the Saudi government flagged him to the German state, but these were not acted upon.
An even clearer instance of failure by the German state to prevent the death of five last week was that while the Christmas market was secured against attacks, the single vehicle route into the area — maintained for the access of emergency vehicles — hadn’t been blocked by having a police truck parked across it, as intended.
Nevertheless, German authority figures have called for calm, dismissed criticism, and even joined in with attempts to blame the AfD for the attack, allegedly by a virulently anti-German migrant. Holger Münch, the head of federal criminal police, said the warnings received by the security services in the years leading up to the attack hadn’t been specific enough to act on.
He told broadcaster ZDF: “The man also published a huge number of posts on the internet. He also had contact with various authorities, made insults and even threats. However, he was not known to have committed acts of violence. We have a completely atypical pattern here. We must now analyse this calmly.”
As recently as August, al-Abdulmohsen had written on social media: “If Germany wants war, we will have it … we will slaughter them”.
The AfD have denied widespread claims in the media and left-wing political circles that suspect al-Abdulmohsen was a devoted supporter of their party, a curious contradiction given his alleged hatred for Germany and Germans appears incompatible with adherence to a German nationalist group. Nevertheless, there is at least evidence of a professed opposition to Islam and the Islamification of German in common.
Speaking at the Magdeburg protest on Monday night, AfD Member of parliament Matthias Büttner said of these claims: “At no point did we have any contact with this man… He never attended any of our events. He was completely unknown to us until the day of this horrible attack”. Büttner said attempts to link the alleged attacker with the populists was a bid to smear the party by the legacy media ahead of Germany’s forthcoming snap election.
Attendees of the rally chanted “deport, deport, deport”.
Speaking at the same ‘United in Mourning for a Secure Future’ event, AfD leader Alice Weidel demanded “real clarification” about the circumstances leading up to the attack and improvements to ensure nothing like it can ever happen again. She said: “Anyone who despises — even kills — the citizens of the country that grants him asylum, who despises everything we stand for, everything we love, does not belong with us… We want something to finally change in this country and that we never again have to mourn with a mother who lost her son in such a senseless and brutal way.”
She further suggested the attacker may have been a crypto-Islamist. Weidel called the killings: “a crime beyond the imagination of everyone here; a crime by an Islamist full of hatred against everything that makes us human — against us as people, against us as Germans, against us as Christians”.
