The Christmas market killer ‘is a closet jihadist and undercover Islamist’, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has claimed.
Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, spoke at a mass rally outside the cathedral in Magdeburg yesterday, near where Saudi doctor Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, 50, smashed his rented SUV into crowd at the Christmas market on Friday.
Nine-year-old André Gleißner was killed and at least 235 people were injured in the horrifying rampage, dozens of whom are still in serious condition, according to authorities.
Weidel embraced the conspiracy theory that the attacker had been a closet jihadist, describing the killing as ‘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’.
AfD figures and supporters have spread an unsubstantiated theory that Abdulmohsen was a covert Islamist who concealed his convictions under an ancient strand of doctrine called taqiyyah, which maintains that Muslims can hide their beliefs in non-Islamic societies.
Police are still puzzling over why Abdulmohsen attacked the market, with the prosecutor indicating that the medic’s grievance about how Germany was treating Saudi dissident asylum seekers could be a possible motive.
Abdulmohsen – who was arrested beside the battered vehicle – has voiced anti-Islam views, anger at German immigration officials including former Chancellor Angela Merkel and support for far-right narratives on the ‘Islamisation’ of Europe.
Weidel comments come as German magazine Spiegel revealed that Abdulmohsen left a will in his rental car, indicating that he expected to die during his rampage after repeatedly vowing he would die ‘this year’ on social media.
Abdulmohsen reportedly willed his entire fortune to the German Red Cross, but did not include any political messages in the document.
He was remanded in custody on five counts of murder and several counts of attempted murder as well as causing grievous bodily harm, prosecutors said on Saturday night, but not so far on terrorism-related charges.
The 50-year-old is currently being held in a high-security prison near Magdeburg, where is constantly monitored by cameras and has to wear paper clothes ‘so that he doesn’t hang himself in his cell’, according to tabloid Bild.
Weidel said at the rally last night that ‘Germany should provide safety for those that are persecuted but should turn those away at the border who take advantage of our hospitality and despise our values’.
This was met with chants of ‘deportation, deportation’ and ‘who doesn’t love Germany, should leave Germany’ by the crowd.
She added: ‘We want that something finally changes in our country, that we can finally live in safety again, that we don’t ever have to mourn with a mother again who had to lose her son in such terrible and brutal way.’
Weidel called for a ‘time of reckoning’, after saying on X that the attack in Magdeburg ‘would not have been possible without uncontrolled immigration’.
Weidel, whose party is polling at around 20 percent but has been shunned as a pariah by all other mainstream parties, added: ‘The state must protect citizens through a restrictive migration policy and consistent deportations.’
Bild wrote that ‘although the background to the terrible attack in Magdeburg has not yet been clarified, it is already clear: There will be a “before” and an “after” in this election campaign.’
It said ‘the attack changes everything’ and will refocus the campaign, so far about Germany’s dire economic situation, on the question of ‘whom people trust to make our homeland safe again’.
The carnage has moved the flashpoint issues of security and immigration back to the centre of politics ahead of Germany’s February 23 snap elections.
Also speaking at the rally last night, Magdeburg-born AfD politician Oliver Kirchner said: ‘Diversity has become a synonym for “stay at home if you want to live longer”.
‘We protect our Christmas markets as if they were borders during the Cold War, but leave our borders open for everyone.
‘Authorities which have ignored every warning from secret services, that don’t deport anyone, not even when the killing of Germans is threatened. The BKA and LKA say in 2023 there was no concrete threat posed by the suspect.
‘The error is not the missing of bollards, the error is that we need bollards at all. When is it enough? Are five deaths, more than 40 seriously injured and more than 200 injured not more than enough? […] Never again is now.
‘Here the interior ministry has failed because it didn’t take several warnings from a Saudi Arabian secret service seriously. Not the AfD is at fault – the current government and the interior ministry here in Saxony-Anhalt (German state) is at fault.’
Tempers were running high over the weekend after it was revealed police were warned about ‘unstable’ Abdulmohsen in September last year, but did nothing more than take screenshots of his twisted online threats.
As German media dug into Abdulmohsen’s past, and investigators gave away little, criticism has rained down from the far-right and far-left parties already bitterly opposed to the government headed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
The Saudi suspect, psychiatrist and anti-Islam activist Abdulmohsen, had made online death threats against German citizens and had a history of quarrelling with state authorities.
News magazine Der Spiegel, citing security sources, said the Saudi secret service had warned Germany’s spy agency BND a year ago about a tweet in which Abdulmohsen threatened Germany would pay a ‘price’ for its treatment of Saudi refugees.
A source close to the government told AFP on Monday that Saudi Arabia had previously requested extradition for Abdulmohsen.
‘There was (an extradition) request,’ said the source, without giving the reason for the request, adding that Riyadh had warned he ‘could be dangerous’. Saudi Arabia had allegedly warned Germany ‘many times’ about Abdulmohsen.
Abdulmohsen, who portrayed himself as a victim of persecution who had renounced Islam, arrived in Germany in 2006 and was granted refugee status 10 years later, according to German media and a Saudi activist.
The doctor often decried what he said was the Islamisation of Germany.
In August, Abdulmohsen wrote on social media: ‘Is there a path to justice in Germany without blowing up a German embassy or randomly slaughtering German citizens?… If anyone knows it, please let me know.’
In a post in December last year, he wrote: ‘Germany is the only country – other than Saudi Arabia – that chases female Saudi asylum seekers all over the world to destroy their lives.
‘Revenge will come soon. Even if it costs me my life. I will make the German nation pay the price of the crimes committed by its government against Saudi refugees.’