Germany Magdeburg Christmas market attacker: What we know so far 

Five people, including a nine-year-old boy, were killed when a man drove a car into a crowded Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, on December 20.

More than 200 people were injured in the attack on Friday evening, including about 40 people who sustained serious or critical injuries.

On Tuesday, Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier used his traditional Christmas address to the nation to call for national unity.

He said: “A dark shadow hangs over this Christmas.”

“Hatred and violence must not have the final word. Let’s not allow ourselves to be driven apart. Let’s stand together.”

Authorities reported that the suspect used emergency exit routes to access the Christmas market grounds, where he ploughed through the crowd during a three-minute rampage. The man surrendered himself to the police at the scene.

The Magdeburg police department said in a statement on Sunday that the suspect has been placed in investigative detention on the suspicion of five counts of murder and multiple counts of attempted murder and grievous bodily harm.

Here’s what we know about the suspect:

Who is the suspect?

The suspect has been identified as Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, a 50-year-old psychiatrist from Saudi Arabia who has lived in Germany for almost two decades.

He is employed at a clinic specialising in treating offenders with addiction issues but has been on sick leave since the end of October.

He has described himself as a “Saudi atheist” and an activist critical of Islam who has helped former Muslims flee from Gulf countries.

Al-Abdulmohsen has been active online, criticising Germany for accepting too many Muslim refugees and supporting far-right conspiracy theories about the “Islamisation” of Europe.

Der Spiegel news magazine reported that al-Abdulmohsen was a supporter of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

Mina Ahadi, chairwoman of Germany’s Central Council of Ex-Muslims, told the German daily newspaper Tageszeitung that the suspect was known to the council and he had tried to send a donation about eight years ago.

She recalled his behaviour as “aggressive” and said she felt like she was “dealing with a mentally ill person”.

Ahadi wrote on X on Saturday that al-Abdulmohsen had “terrorised” the council for several years.

“His delusional ideas went so far that he assumed that even organisations critical of Islamism were part of the Islamist conspiracy,” she said.

German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser told reporters on Saturday: “At this stage, the only thing we can say with certainty is that the perpetrator was clearly Islamophobic. We can already confirm that. Everything else is subject to further investigations.”

On Sunday she said the attacker did “not fit any previous pattern” because “he acted like an Islamist terrorist although ideologically he was clearly an enemy of Islam”.

Parliamentary committee hearings will be held on December 30 into the attack in which Faeser and the heads of Germany’s domestic and foreign intelligence services will answer questions, a senior lawmaker told the AFP news agency.

What was the suspect’s motive?

Magdeburg Prosecutor Horst Nopens said on Saturday that one factor contributing to the suspect’s motives could be his frustration with Germany’s handling of Saudi refugees.

The suspect had issued online death threats targeting German citizens and had a record of conflicts with state authorities.

According to a Der Spiegel news magazine report which quoted security sources, the Saudi secret service alerted the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, a year earlier about a tweet in which al-Abdulmohsen warned that Germany would face consequences for its treatment of Saudi refugees.

In August he 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.”

Quoting security sources, Die Welt newspaper reported that the German state and federal police carried out a “risk assessment” on al-Abdulmohsen last year but concluded he posed “no specific danger”.

Felix Neumann, policy adviser on security issues at Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation, told Al Jazeera it was initially assumed that the incident was “an Islamist attack as it was very similar to the attack on Breitscheidplatz in 2016” when a truck deliberately drove into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 13 people.

“Looking at the comments he made online, however, it is now rather unlikely that it was an Islamist attack,” Neumann said.

“The perpetrator was very critical of Islam and shared right-wing extremist narratives on his X account. Further investigations will show what motivated him in the end, but the concept of ‘salad bar extremism’ could apply here.

“This means that individuals individually pick out those aspects that are plausible for them, but there is no uniform, coherent ideology.”

Could the government have done more to prevent the attack?

Neumann said: “Germany is a federal system, which has various advantages, but sharing information is not one of them.

“Foreign intelligence services and individuals who provided information about the perpetrator’s potential danger must now be investigated, and it must be established where there were errors in the chain of information sharing.

“This must then be optimised so that potential threat analyses can be passed on better between the authorities.”