When German police identified the suspected Magdeburg Christmas market killer as Taleb al Abdulmohsen, the name sounded familiar. Two days later, when I saw the image of his X account on a television news program, I realized that I knew him. Well, not exactly. We had been in contact online because of her activism against Islam and the oppression of Saudi women. But there was something that didn’t fit: The weapon with which he illustrated his profile. I hadn’t seen her before. It was disturbing.
Immediately, I sought to remember. I came across his Twitter (later renamed Their mobilization on the social network attracted international attention to a phenomenon that was beginning to come to light. Several rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch (HRW), echoed that issue.
Some time later, Al Abdulmohsen began sending me messages about issues regarding the treatment of women or homosexuals in Saudi Arabia. At the end of 2019, she managed to attract my attention with a series of posts in which she denounced that “Saudi girls were being expelled from school for wearing a white ribbon on their wrist” to denounce the mistreatment of girls locked up in youth centers and against the women’s guardianship system.
The previous year, an Iranian activist had launched the White Wednesday movement against mandatory headscarves with relative success despite the risks. I thought Al Abdulmohsen was trying to emulate her. I was not able to find, however, traces of the #WhiteRibbon, as the initiative labeled it. None of my Saudi acquaintances had heard of it. I told him and he took it well. He even asked my permission to mention it on his blog.
Al Abdulmohsen described himself then as “a Saudi psychiatrist who took refuge in Germany to escape the death penalty after having renounced Islam.” That’s why I thought of him when Juan Rubio Hancock asked me for an article for Verne about the fact that the book The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins would have been downloaded three million times in Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Islam and where the 2014 anti-terrorism law equated atheism with terrorism. In my travels through the Middle East I have met many non-practicing Muslims, but few who openly declare themselves atheists (even where apostasy is not punished, there is the risk of some extremist taking the law into their own hands). His responses were quite measured. He even told me that the Saudi government had “stopped taking an active role in the persecution of atheists.”
None of that fits with the brutal attack in Magdeburg on the 20th that left five dead, including a 9-year-old child. But the presentation that Al Abdulmohsen makes in his X profile is not the same as when he was in contact with him. Now the alleged murderer is defined as “Saudi military opposition.” He also accuses the country that welcomed him in 2006 and granted him refugee status ten years later of “wanting to Islamize Europe.” All this under the image of a semi-automatic rifle, shocking to say the least for an activist who said he was concerned about the rights of women and homosexuals. In his blog he has gone on to advise against seeking asylum in Germany.
He hadn’t paid attention to his profile since the atheism interview. But its classification is complex. Those who insist on seeing an Islamist terrorist should be reminded that his career breaks all schemes. The type of attack is typical of violent Sunni extremists. Al Abdulmohsen had not only renounced Islam, but comes from the Shiite minority in Saudi Arabia. Some expert has mentioned that detail to talk about the use of taqiyyaa pretense with supposedly pious goals (such as hiding beliefs to preserve survival). It seems far-fetched: did he need 18 years to show his true self? Why didn’t you act sooner?
Their posts remain to be analyzed, which incredibly are still available on X despite the calls for violence in some of them. Its content reveals an unhealthy obsession with the German authorities’ treatment of “ex-Saudi Muslims” and what he perceives as support for the spread of Islam; It also lends credence to far-right conspiracy theories. Experts will have to determine if they are the result of extreme radicalization or a mental problem (he had been on sick leave since October). Until then, any speculation will only project the wishes of the person making it.
