Germany Christmas Market Suspect Involved in 7 Cases Before Attack

Shortly before Christmas, the man – identified only as Taleb A according to Germany’s privacy laws – drove a car at high speed through the Magdeburg Christmas market, killing five people and injuring almost 300. He remains in custody.

Taleb A, a Saudi national, had been working as a doctor in a psychiatric hospital in the town of Bernburg, south of Magdeburg, since 2020, treating addicts who had committed crimes.

Taleb A as the accused

Police reportedly launched an investigation after Taleb A posted on X on December 1, 2023, criticizing Germany’s treatment of Saudi asylum seekers and threatening revenge.

Officers tried to speak to him five times about the threat, but were unable to find him at home or at work.

According to a report in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, an attempt to obtain a search warrant was rejected by a judge and the proceedings were later dropped.

Taleb A was also accused of threatening a lawyer who had once represented him, as well as the lawyer’s family and office staff. After a complaint was filed, police visited him at work in hospital on October 4, 2024 to warn him that he was being monitored.

Taleb A as the complainant

The suspect also filed five complaints of his own, security sources told dpa. In one case, Taleb A complained that a USB stick containing evidence of crimes committed by Saudi Arabia had been stolen from his letterbox.

He also reportedly made a complaint about an association that assists atheist refugees, accusing the employees of sexual misconduct on two occasions.

Two other cases raised by Taleb A concerned alleged threats by the Saudi Arabian government and a defamation case.

Police visited him again on September 28, 2023 after he threatened the Cologne public prosecutor’s office over the way it handled a case.

Employer not informed

The police did not communicate the reason for visiting the suspect at work in October 2024 to the hospital administration, a spokeswoman from Salus, the company running the hospital where Taleb A worked, told dpa.

Police are allowed to share personal data with public and non-public bodies for reasons of preventing criminal offences.

In response to an enquiry, the regional criminal investigation office said it had no indications that “a transfer of data could avert dangers in the employer’s environment,” meaning the conditions for sharing the data were not fulfilled.

Security sources told dpa that the suspect sent the threat to the lawyer by email and it was therefore not considered urgent. “It didn’t arrive on his doorstep,” said a person familiar with the case.

His employer also told dpa that the suspect’s medical qualifications were not questioned by his employer. “Taleb A gave his superiors no reason to doubt his medical qualifications,” the spokeswoman said, adding that he had not been working since the end of October because of holiday and sick leave.

Push for better exchange of data

As the suspect was repeatedly the focus of security authorities, several politicians are pushing to improve the data exchange between federal and regional governments.

“The bottleneck was the lack of networking between authorities,” the general secretary of Germany’s liberal Free Democrats, Marco Buschmann, told German media group Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland.

“This is why we need a legal basis for the exchange of data between the federal and state governments in joint centres such as the Joint Counter-Terrorism Centre,” Buschmann said, noting that there were around 80 indications of the suspect’s dangerousness.