Agence France-Presse
The German government pledged Sunday to fully investigate whether there were security lapses before the Christmas market car-ramming attack that killed five people and injured over 200.
Political pressure has built on the question of potential missed warnings about Saudi suspect Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, a 50-year-old psychiatrist who had made online death threats and previously had trouble with the law.
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser and the heads of Germany’s domestic and foreign intelligence services are due to answer questions at parliamentary committee hearings on Dec. 30, a senior lawmaker told AFP.
Faeser vowed Sunday that “no stone will be left unturned” in shedding light on what information had been available to security services ahead of last Friday’s bloody attack in the eastern city of Magdeburg.
She stressed that the attacker did “not fit any previous pattern” because “he acted like an Islamist terrorist, although ideologically he was clearly an enemy of Islam.”
Abdulmohsen has in the past called himself a “Saudi atheist” who helped women flee Gulf countries and charged Germany was doing too little to help them.
In online posts, he also strongly criticized Germany for allowing in too many Muslim refugees and backed far-right conspiracy theories about the “Islamisation” of Europe.
In one post, he wrote: “Is there a path to justice in Germany without blowing up a German embassy or randomly slaughtering German citizens?… If anyone knows it, please let me know.”
News magazine Der Spiegel, citing security sources, said the Saudi secret service had warned Germany’s spy agency BND a year ago about a tweet in which Abdulmohsen threatened Germany would pay a “price” for how it treated Saudi refugees.
Die Welt daily reported, also citing security sources, that German state and federal police had carried out a “risk assessment” on Abdulmohsen last year but concluded that he posed “no specific danger.”
‘Blood and screams’
The city of Magdeburg has been in deep mourning over the mass carnage on Friday evening, when an SUV smashed through a crowd at its Christmas market, killing four women and a 9-year-old child and injuring 205 people.
Surgeons at overwhelmed hospitals have worked around the clock, and one health worker told local media of “blood on the floor everywhere, people screaming, lots of painkillers being administered.”
Scholz on Saturday condemned the “terrible, insane” attack and made a call for national unity, at a time Germany is headed for early elections on Feb. 23.
But as German media dug into Abdulmohsen’s past and investigators gave away little, criticism rained down from opposition parties.
Conservative CDU lawmaker Alexander Throm charged that “many citizens feel… that the Scholz government has completely failed in terms of internal security.”
He demanded greater police powers to monitor and analyse data from social media platforms, telecommunications and surveillance cameras with facial recognition technology.
The far-right AfD called for a special session of parliament, and the head of the far-left BSW party, Sahra Wagenknecht, demanded that Faeser explain “why so many tips and warnings were ignored beforehand.”
Mass-circulation daily Bild asked: “Why did our police and intelligence services do nothing, even though they had the Saudi on their radar?… And why were the tips from Saudi Arabia apparently ignored?”
It charged that “German authorities usually only find out about attack plans in time when foreign services warn them” and called for sweeping reforms after the election for a complete “turnaround in internal security.”
Senior MP Dirk Wiese of Scholz’s Social Democrats said the Dec. 30 hearings will summon the heads of the BND, the domestic intelligence service BfV and the Office for Migration and Refugees.
‘Ultra-right conspiracy ideologies’
The media meanwhile reported more details on Abdulmohsen, who had worked at a clinic that treats offenders with substance addiction problems but had been on sick leave since late October.
Der Spiegel reported that in 2013, a court fined him for “disturbing the public peace by threatening to commit crimes” after he had darkly referenced the deadly attack on the Boston marathon.
The chairwoman of the group Central Council of Ex-Muslims, Mina Ahadi, said Abdulmohsen “is no stranger to us, because he has been terrorising us for years.”
She labelled him “a psychopath who adheres to ultra-right conspiracy ideologies” and said he “doesn’t just hate Muslims, but everyone who doesn’t share his hatred.”