Taleb A. – An Untypical Terrorist?

Always Worth Saying, Going Postal
Magdeburg Christmas Market.
Impressionen aus Magdeburg 2024-12-21,
C.Suthorn
Licence CC BY-SA 2.0

Labelled by mainstream media as an untypical terrorist and referred to by the German legal system as Taleb A., Taleb Jawad H al-Abdulmohsen was born into a Shiite family in February 1974 in the Saudi Arabian city of Hofuf. The municipality of 700,000 sits in the east of the country, close to the Persian Gulf, at about the halfway mark of 90 desolate miles that separate the neighbouring states of Bahrain and Qatar. Despite being a Sunni nation, Hofuf is in the majority Shiite province of al-Ahsa, named after the al-Ahsa oasis famous for its dates.

Abdulmohsen pursued medical studies in Saudi Arabia before relocating to Germany in 2006 to further his specialisation in psychotherapy. Once in the country, he said he left the Muslim faith in secret and became an atheist a decade earlier when in his early twenties. Now a German resident, he claimed to be a refugee and founded an online message board called ‘We Are Saudis’ as a forum for those trying to escape Saudi Arabia and other repressive Gulf States.

Across 2007 and 2008 the Saudis tried to have him extradited back to the kingdom. Although described elsewhere as being for ‘rape and terrorism’ the Saudi authorities based the extradition upon allegations of people trafficking of girls through ‘We Are Saudis’. Armed with the atheist card (leaving the Muslim faith, or ‘apostasy’, is a capital offence in Saudi Arabia) the Germans refused to extradite, citing concerns over the man’s welfare if returned to his homeland. In 2013 Abdulmohsen troubled the legal system again, fined by a Rostcok court for ‘disturbing the public peace by threatening to commit crimes’.

Two years later, Chancellor Angela Merkle’s ‘Wir Schaffen Das’ [we can do it] policy opened the door to mass immigration into Germany. The following year, Abdulmohsen applied for asylum, which was granted within four months. About the same time, he joined Twitter and began liking and re-posting anti-Saudi and anti-Muslim content. Headlining himself as ‘the Saudi military opposition’, his profile banner showed the side view of a machine gun.

Besides anti-Saudi and anti-Muslim rhetoric, his posts contained vitriolic abuse aimed at other anti-regime German-based Saudi ex-pats. This cemented that community’s suspicion that Abdulmohsen was an agent tasked to disrupt their activities and spy on them. His atheism was suspected to be a deliberate lie, or ‘taqiyya’, as were Saudi attempts at extradition. From the outset the authorities in Riyadh must have realised they would fail due to human rights legislation and the death sentence attached to apostasy.

Abdulmohsen’s profile rose in 2019 when he made a series of interviews, including one with the BBC. In the full piece (an abridged version now sits on the broadcaster’s website) Abdulmohsen claims 90% of those being brought to the West through ‘We Are Saudis’ are women aged between 18 and 30. The example used is of ‘Dinah’. Although afraid to use her complete or real name, Dinah is happy to appear on camera and laughs and smiles while telling her story. Maintaining the female-only narrative, Dinah says she left the UAE after her mother pressured her to marry.

Also in 2019 members of Germany’s Secular Refugee Aid (SRA) filed a police complaint against Abdulmohsen following vile slander and verbal attacks aimed at them. Their public citation claimed the SRA were “unable to find any reason to explain his defamation campaign and the aggressiveness of his accusations”. In private, they suspected he was a Saudi agent tasked to spy on them, renegade Saudis and ex-Muslims. The slanders included messages sent to high-profile atheist Richard Dawkins making lurid accusations about the sexual behaviour of SRA’s Dittmar Steiner towards Saudi girls claiming asylum in Germany.

Despite the Rostock conviction and legal cases being pursued against him, in March 2020 Abdulmohsen began working as a psychiatric specialist at Salus, a clinic in a Bernburg correctional facility that treats criminals with substance addiction problems. Between then and now, Abdulmohsen lived in a modern apartment in Bernberg, a town of 30,000 lying 28 miles south of Magdeburg along the A14 autobahn.

Throughout 2023 and 2024 there were various warnings both from the Saudi authorities and Saudi ex-pats living in Germany. These concerned the increasingly disturbing nature of communications being sent by Abdulmohsen which became anti-German as well as anti-Muslim, anti-Saudi and anti-Saudi exile. According to the German newspaper Die Welt, the federal police took screenshots of his content and carried out a risk assessment but concluded he posed no specific danger.

Through a combination of sick leave and holiday entitlement, Abdulmohsen left his employment at the Bernberg clinic in October 2024, never to return. Troubling the legal system once more, the day before his 20th December attack on the Magdeburg Christmas market, the 50-year-old was due to appear at the Tiergarten district court. There he stood accused of ‘misuse of emergency calls’ with the fire department at a Berlin police station on February 23rd.

He didn’t attend the hearing but remained in Bernburg. CCTV showed him at the Saale Grill, a restaurant he visited four times a week that sat a few streets from his apartment. According to Germany’s Bild newspaper, Abdulmohsen was also a regular visitor to Magdeburg’s Maritim Hotel. Located 500 metres from the Christmas market, Bild says he used his time there to spy out the locale. In doing so, he discovered a security vulnerability. After renting a room at the luxury hotel on Friday 20th December, Abdulmohsen hired a dark-coloured BMW M3 SUV.

At 7:02 pm Abdulmohsen headed north along Breitner Weg striking pedestrians. At the Alter Markt [Old Market] tram stop, he turned right into Alter Markt proper. Here, a line of stalls ran for 220 metres through a square and alongside the Rathaus (town hall) to end at Jacobstrasse. Supposed to be secure against ramming attacks, an emergency corridor was in place to allow for entrance and exit to the market if necessary. Unless required, this corridor should have been blocked by a police vehicle, but it was not.

Bypassing security bollards and using the unguarded emergency corridor to enter the market, Abdulmohsen raced through the crowd between the stalls killing five and injuring over 200. At the end of the street he turned right opposite St Johns Church and proceeded for a short distance along Jacobstrasse. By now a stone’s throw from the River Elbe, he took another right onto Ernst-Reuter Allee and just over 100 metres later came to a halt at another tram stop.

By now it was 7:05 pm, only three minutes after the attack began. Police surrounded the car – its front battered and windscreen shattered by impacts with pedestrians – arrested the driver and seized the SUV. Some viewing mobile phone footage taken at the time of the arrest claim to hear a cry of ‘Alluah Akbar’ but the audio is far from clear. Police thought a suspect package contained within the vehicle to be a bomb, but this fear proved to be unfounded.

Explained away by mainstream media as bizarre, untypical, and not fitting the usual terror profile, just how unusual are the circumstances surrounding Abdulmohsen?

Far from unprecedented, ramming is a well-used modus operandi of Muslim terrorists. Previous incidents include Nice in 2016 when 86 were murdered, Stockholm in 2017, five murdered, Barcelona, 2017, 16. Closer to home, on Westminster Bridge five were murdered in March 2017. Back in Germany, a Christmas market at Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz saw 13 slaughtered in 2016.

Those who think a middle-aged doctor is incapable of such things should think again. Former President Assad of Syria was a London eye surgeon. In an attack on Glasgow Airport in 2007 one of the two perpetrators who attempted to drive into the departures hall with a car bomb was Billal Abdullah. After qualifying as a doctor in Baghdad in 2004, 44-year-old Abdullah practised at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, two miles from the airport.

As for Abdulmohsen’s atheism-based asylum status, Syrian Emad Al Swealmeen claimed to have converted to Christianity but then bombed Liverpool Women’s Hospital on Remembrance Day 2021. Likewise, London acid attacker Abdul Shakoor Ezedi, an Afghan illegal immigrant and convicted sex offender. He avoided deportation by claiming to have become a Christian but then had a Muslim burial after drowning in the Thames following injuries inflicted on himself during his attack.

Regarding ‘We Are Saudi’, although all the examples given in mainstream media are of escaping young women, a suspicion lingers that – as with the illegal immigrant Channel dingy crossings – many may be unvetted men of fighting age.

With likes and shares of Right-wing content included in Abdulmohsen’s anti-Saudi, anti-Muslim, anti-ex-pat social media posts, the mainstream media has the distraction it wants. This distraction conveniently shifts focus away from concerns within the German anti-Saudi regime community that the perpetrator of the December 20th Christmas market terror attack may have been acting as an agent for a repressive regime — one previously proven capable of dismembering journalist Jamal Khashoggi with a bone saw on foreign soil.
 

© Always Worth Saying 2024