Germany tries to untangle complex profile of market attack suspect

BERNBURG, Germany – A frequent critic on social media of the German government, as well as of radical Islam. A reclusive neighbor who appeared to live most of his life on the internet. A man whose extreme political postings online prompted an alert to Germany from Saudi Arabia.

Officials in Germany were trying Sunday to piece together the complicated profile of the man in custody suspected of killing five people by driving an SUV into a crowd at a Christmas market two days earlier, an attack that has stunned the country.

Authorities have described the suspect as a 50-year-old Saudi doctor who had been living in Germany for nearly two decades. They say they are still trying to determine his motives. The Salus Clinic in Bernburg, a town about a half-hour drive from Magdeburg, said that the man worked as a psychiatrist in its closed ward, treating offenders who suffer from drug addiction.

The victims in the assault, which took place in the eastern city of Magdeburg, were a 9-year-old boy and four women aged 45 to 75, police said in a statement Sunday.

More than 200 others were wounded, 41 of them seriously, in the attack that shattered the peace of Germany’s Christmas season, which is celebrated in hundreds of outdoor markets around the country.

Mourners on Sunday visited a memorial to the victims set up on the steps of a church across the street from the market in Magdeburg, and a service was held Saturday night. At the same time Saturday, in a square nearby, several hundred people attended a rally where demonstrators chanted, “Deport! Deport!”

The suspect, identified as Taleb A. in keeping with German privacy laws, was questioned Saturday, security officials said. On Sunday, a judge ordered him to remain in detention as authorities continued their investigations.

Officials said that they were still trying to understand why the attacker decided to drive the SUV, a rented vehicle, into the crowded Christmas market, which was being held in a square in front of Magdeburg’s city hall. Holger Münch, head of Germany’s domestic security agency, the Federal Criminal Office, said that authorities had been aware of the suspect and had received a warning about him from Saudi Arabia in November 2023. But the tipoff was “so unspecific” that German authorities did not treat it as a signal that the man was plotting an attack, he said.

“He was not seen to be capable of violent acts,” Münch told a German public broadcaster.

State police in Saxony-Anhalt, which includes Magdeburg, said that they had opened an investigation after that warning and had questioned the Saudi doctor but had then closed the inquiry. Authorities said that he had not fitted their profile of an Islamic extremist and that they had not categorized him as a potential threat.

Münch said that authorities had not yet been able to establish a motive. If it turns out that the attacker was driven by political or religious conviction, the killings could be considered terrorism, which would cause the federal prosecutor to take up the case.

In any case, authorities appear likely to face questions about whether they ignored warning signs that might have helped prevent the attack. In social media posts, the doctor had criticized Germany for what he called authorities’ tolerance of radical Islam. He also expressed support for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party and reposted comments by the group’s leaders warning of the threat of Islamic law being imposed in Germany. But Münch said that the doctor’s activity did not fit into the description of a far-right extremist either, describing him as “atypical.”

Interviews, social media posts and witness accounts from several years back suggest that the detained man had gone from criticizing Islam into something else, in which he saw the German government and even fellow refugee activists as plotting against him.

“I am the most aggressive critic of Islam in history,” he told German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an interview that he gave in 2019.

Since the attack, several people have posted messages on social media about their encounters with the suspect, which they described as often upsetting or provoking a feeling that he was harassing them.

One of his targets was Mina Ahadi of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims, a group in Germany that represents people from Muslim countries who do not believe in or no longer practice Islam. She told German publication Der Spiegel that the doctor had first donated money to her association, only to ask for it back within days. She said that she decided to block him after his messages became increasingly aggressive.

In a message posted to his social media account in the minutes between the attack and his arrest, the doctor suggested that German authorities were targeting him.

While online, the doctor was an outspoken activist; in person, people who worked with or met him described him as friendly and polite, but private.

The doctor lived in a house in a quiet street not far from the clinic in Bernburg, a small town of about 30,000. Apparently, he did not own a car and walked to work, his neighbors said.

“A smile at most, but we never spoke,” said Horst Hirschmann, 53, a former police officer, who often walks his dog past the three-story house where the doctor lived in an apartment.

Two to four times a week, the doctor would walk a mile or so to Saale Grill, one of the few Middle Eastern restaurants in Bernburg, said Yaser al-Alo, the owner.

Al-Alo, a Kurd who speaks Arabic, said he tried several times to engage his guest in conversation but never got far, with the man even refusing to say where he was from.

“He would not look right or left, but only stared at his screen,” al-Alo said. “I didn’t even know the man was a doctor.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.