German Christmas market attack: suspect held anti-Islam views, report
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New Delhi: The suspect in the deadly car-attack on Christmas market in Germany on Friday is found to be a Saudi national with anti-Islamic views, according to news agency AFP.
Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, a 50-year-old psychiatrist, allegedly ploughed a car into a Berlin Christmas market in the eastern city of Magdeburg that left five people dead, including a 9-year-old child, and injured 205 others.
The attack comes nearly eight years after a terrorist had rammed a truck into a Berlin Christmas market.
Unlike the previous case, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen is a self-described ‘Saudi atheist’ according to the evidences that investigators gathered from the psychiatrist’s online posts.
It is reported that he ‘railed against Islam’ and was not happy with ‘Germany's permissive attitude towards refugees from other mainly Muslim countries’.
However a prosecutor reportedly said that ‘the background to the crime... could have been disgruntlement with the way Saudi Arabian refugees are treated in Germany’.
Meanwhile, the country’s Interior Minister Nancy Fraser said that Taleb al-Abdulmohsen harboured ‘Islamophobic’ views.
On the other hand Taha Al-Hajji, belonging to the Berlin-based European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights, termed Abdulmohsen a ‘psychologically disturbed person’, adding that he has ‘exaggerated sense of self-importance’.
Footage from the scene of Friday’s attack in Magdeburg showed a black SUV ramming into the crowds at high speed mowing people and overturning stalls.
Alongside cordoning off the area, authorities have cancelled the Christmas market for the remainder of the year.
Abdulmohsen in an online post in August wrote ‘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’.
Meanwhile, it is reported citing German national daily Die Welt that German police after conducting a risk assessment on Abdulmohsen last year found in him ‘no specific danger’.
In the wake of the deadly attack, authorities have beefed up security at Christmas markets across the country deploying more police in cities like Hamburg and Leipzig.