On December 20, 2024, Saudi doctor and refugee Taleb al-Abdulmohsen drove a rental BMW into a crowded Christmas market in the East German town of Magdeburg, killing five and injuring 200. Al-Abdulmohsen had been living in Germany since 2006 and applied for asylum in 2016. Since the attack, speculation has been rife about possible motives. Al-Abdulmohsen was active in refugee aid, especially for ex-Muslims from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. He called himself a “Leftist” but also voiced support for the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
In this interview, Canadian ex-Muslim activist Yasmine Mohammed, author of Unveiled: How the West Empowers Radical Muslims, who has known al-Abdulmohsen from online encounters, sheds light on the attacker’s motives and beliefs. Middle East Forum spoke to Mohammed in France via a voice call.
MEF: After the Magdeburg attack, you posted that you had known the attacker from Twitter/X for several years, where he was “obsessively” going after ex-Muslims and “didn’t seem stable.”
Yasmine Mohammed: For I’d say four, five years he’s been messaging me in English very obsessively. He’s had multiple accounts over these years. I was inclined to trust him because he had an ex-Muslim support website that he used to help atheists who were escaping from the Muslim world, specifically Saudi Arabia.
I knew people he had helped and supported and so I figured he was a legitimate activist. Then he started to obsessively contact me, sharing evidence and videos with me. He was trying to expose another activist named Rana Ahmad Hamd, who runs an organization in Germany called Secular Refugee Relief (Säkulare Flüchtlingshilfe). She’s a well-known activist, closely affiliated with [evolutionary biologist and vocal atheist] Richard Dawkins.
… [Abdulmohsen] was trying to convince me that a person that’s affiliated with Rana’s organization is a sexual predator, and he believes that she’s involved in sexual trafficking. I essentially said to him on multiple occasions, if you are concerned about a German man or a German organization and you are in Germany, then go ahead and contact the German police.
I’m not gonna put out baseless claims. He wants me to “expose her” by sharing this evidence of his on my Twitter account and I said, I’m not gonna do that.
MEF: On his website he seems to write obsessively about women, sex and prostitution.
“Over the years he has just become more and more deranged and erratic.”
YM: Over the years he has just become more and more deranged and erratic. The last time I ever clicked, like, on any of his tweets where he was supporting feminists in Saudi Arabia was in 2019. I was very hesitant to even be interacting with him anymore because he was devolving into something really weird, so I just wanted to keep my distance from him.
MEF: What do you know about his organization?
YM: Well, I know that his organization legitimately helped people who were apostates who escaped from Saudi Arabia.
One of those people is Rahaf Mohammad. She was a very high-profile case. She’s written a book called Rebel. She’s one of the many people that that he helped to get out of Saudi Arabia. So, he had proven himself to be a legitimate activist. … He wasn’t crazy at the beginning. He was just weird.
MEF: Often people who are alone and unmarried tend to go down rabbit holes if they spend a lot of time online. Suddenly they’re flat earthers.
YM: That’s exactly what happened to him. He was all alone in a foreign land. He started to hate Germans and Germany because he felt like they weren’t doing enough to support him and to fight against Islamists. He felt like Germany was basically leading itself into social suicide like he just couldn’t believe. He would get very frustrated.
You see this from so many Swedish and French ex-Muslim activists. They have that same feeling of frustration and anger that they basically left their homelands, their families their communities and escaped to this country where they thought they would find freedom and security and instead they find this “free” country capitulating to terrorists. That’s the theme of my book, so I get it I get it, but he just went down a rabbit hole and started to get even more and more erratic.
His stuff made less and less sense, he was much more and more aggressive and insistent, and on a couple of occasions, he said he was going to kill innocent German people because he wanted to get their attention. He needed them to see that they were in danger.
MEF: So, there’s a possibility he may have actually tried to stage a “false flag” attack.
YM: Yes, and that could be why he followed the same method that Muslims have done in the past, which is ramming his car into people at a Christmas market.
MEF: [Author and blogger] Robert Spencer had an interesting tweet, in which he said this looks like a Muslim returning to the faith who has to do something radical to absolve himself.
YM: No, and there is nothing [to support that]. I mean, listen, I’m an ex-Muslim and there are shitty agnostic atheists out there. There are shitty people from all religions and all ideologies. Why would the atheist Muslims be an exception? So many people are hell-bent now on saying he was actually a Shi’i Muslim. I can’t be 100 percent sure if he was or wasn’t a Saudi agent.
But there was nothing I saw from his actions or his communication with me that would have given any hint or indication that he was a “fake ex-Muslim.” He really did hate that religion and want to help people who were escaping from it. He also, unfortunately, turned into hating German people too.
MEF: He didn’t have a lot of friends, sounds like.
YM: Yeah. He just was not a stable human being. I mean, how can you be so concerned about women being sexually exploited and your response to that is, “I’m gonna kill people because nobody’s listening to the fact these women are being sexually exploited”?
MEF: You kind of wonder whether the German secret police shouldn’t have had him on their radar. People tend to brag about that kind of stuff if they’re a little loopy. Did he mention anything like that?
YM: He did mention all the time that the German authorities were after him, that the German authorities were not supporting him, so he hated the German authorities, even though they saved him from Saudi Arabia.
MEF: He worked at a state hospital. And the Saudis were trying to warn the Germans about him in 2023.
“He did mention all the time that the German authorities were after him, that the German authorities were not supporting him, so he hated the German authorities.”
YM: That’s very common, though. I’m not defending Talib, but that’s what Saudi Arabia does when somebody is an asylum seeker. They very often will try to get that asylum seeker extradited back to Saudi Arabia so they can deal with them—whether it’s a woman running away from forced marriage, an ex-Muslim or a gay person. … I’ve got a woman right now that I’m talking to that’s dealing with this. They’re saying she owes the Saudi government money, based on student loans, and she needs to come back because they want to try her for this money that she stole from the government.
MEF: Do you know why he fled Saudi Arabia?
YM: He said it was because of his disbelief [apostasy]. He was seeking asylum in Germany because he’s a non-believer and the punishment for renouncing Islam in Saudi Arabia is execution.
MEF: So, he became an atheist in Saudi Arabia and then left?
YM: Well, he was an atheist in Saudi Arabia, but he never publicly stated it before he came to Germany. Once he publicly stated it, his life was in danger, so he was seeking asylum.
MEF: It’s just such an odd history because he seems to have come as a doctor 2006 and then didn’t apply for asylum until 10 years later.
YM: The story I was given was not the truth, obviously, because that doesn’t add up.
I know of people who say that they’re Christian, they’re gay, or ex-Muslim. They all say whatever they need to say to get asylum. They just want to be in the West. Some of those people legitimately are trying to come to the West because they’re trying to escape from countries with Islamic law, while others are just coming to the West because they want to spread Islam, you know, and so they want to infiltrate. So, it’s a hornet’s nest.
MEF: But you don’t think Taleb was practicing taqiyya [religiously sanctioned deception]?
YM: No, I don’t think he’s practicing anything. I think he was deranged and confused. Taqiyya does not work in this circumstance at all. The fact it’s being thrown around everywhere by people who don’t really understand what it means is just adding so much noise to an already confusing situation.
Taqiyya is a very Shi’i concept. … The idea of taqiyya is that you can pretend to be Sunni so that the Sunnis don’t kill you. Some Muslims extrapolate from the taqiyya concept that they can pretend to be anything within an unsafe environment. I was told as a kid, if the non-Muslims are gonna kill you and they say eat this pork to prove that you’re not a Muslim, then you can eat the pork because you’re trying to save your life. So, you’re allowed to pretend that you’re not a Muslim to save your life. … If you’re just faking it, you’re not going to genuinely help people. Rahaf Mohammed is living comfortably in Canada. If he was a taqiyya “double agent,” then he would have maybe brought her to Canada and made her life miserable or told the Saudi authorities where she was living. And she’s not the only one. There are countless examples of people—mostly women—that he helped.
MEF: There may be something to the claim that he was mostly interested in women.
YM: Yeah, as with all these types—he was very controlling of women. Even helping women was from that sense of power and control. You know, “I am your protector. Bow to me.” It was very clear that he was not a humanitarian person. He was just too aggressive and angry and demanding. He was not a kind and thoughtful person like most people in this space.
Definitely100 percent narcissism energy from him, especially the way he talked to women.
MEF: He was all over the map on his social media. He was allegedly supporting the AfD, then he said that he’s left-wing, and then he’s supporting Hamas, or he’s supporting Israel. Was he just nuts, or what do you think?
YM: I think he liked to say things that were controversial and that were going to get him attention. There’s one tweet where he was supporting Hamas, but it was a sarcastic tweet. … It’s very clear when you read it in Arabic that he was writing it in a sarcastic way.
MEF: The German left-wing jumped all over that and tried to use it against Elon Musk and the AfD.
YM: Yeah, everybody’s trying to pigeonhole him and make things nice and easy and clean but nothing about this is easy and clean. There’s no pigeonhole to put him into, there’s no clean answer to this.
I genuinely don’t think it had anything to do with his beliefs or his ideology. I think he was just a man who was spiraling, and I genuinely believe he did this simply because it was finally gonna get him attention.
People were finally going to listen to him, because he has been screaming for people to pay attention to him for four to five years and he’s just being ignored at every turn, and I think he just lost it and he said, “You know what? I’m gonna do something that nobody can ignore.”
Yasmine Mohammed is the author of “Unveiled: How the West Empowers Radical Muslims” and founder of ex-Muslim support group “Free Hearts Free Minds.”
