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A man has gone on trial in the eastern German city of Magdeburg on charges of murdering six people and attempting to murder hundreds more by deliberately ploughing his SUV into a packed Christmas market last December.
Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, 51, a psychiatrist from Saudi Arabia, appeared in court on Monday wearing handcuffs and with his feet shackled, accompanied by armed police. He will be held in a bullet-proof glass case throughout the trial.
In a lengthy indictment read out over several hours, the chief public prosecutor, Matthias Böttcher, said the defendant had acted “with the intention of killing an indeterminately large number of people”, when, on 20 December 2024, he “deliberately drove his 2-tonne, 340-horsepower car into a large number of pedestrians”.
In what Böttcher described as a carefully planned attack that took place between 7.02pm and 7.04pm, the majority of deaths occurred within a few seconds.
A nine-year-old boy and five women, aged between 45 and 75, were killed. A further 338 people were injured, 31 of them in a way prosecutors describe as life-changing.
Abdulmohsen was described as a critic of Islam and a supporter of far-right views and radical conspiracy theories who appeared to have been motivated by “personal resentment” and a sense of “perceived injustice” after a legal dispute.
Because of what prosecutors have said is his extreme rhetoric and history of making violent threats, including on social media, Germany’s security services have faced accusations that they could have prevented the attack had they done more to intervene. Saudi authorities had warned their German counterparts about him over specific threats he had made in 2024.
Other questions have been asked as to how Abdulmohsen was able to overcome the barriers put up around the market in response to a deadly assault on a Christmas market in Berlin in 2016 by an Islamist terrorist.
The court in Magdeburg has been constructed for the trial at a cost of €4.5m (£4m). It includes space for more than 170 co-plaintiffs and their lawyers. The trial, for which about 50 days have been set aside, is expected to last at least until March.
There are no formal pleas in the German legal system but the defendant told the court he planned to respond to the charges “for hours, perhaps even for days”, agencies in the courtroom reported.
Abdulmohsen, who came to Germany as a refugee from Saudi Arabia in 2006 and had been working as a psychiatrist since 2020, faces life imprisonment if convicted.
The attack was one of a series of atrocities carried out by foreign nationals that added heat to Germany’s debate over immigration before February’s general election and contributed to the success of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party. Immigration is once again expected to dominate next September’s state election in Saxony-Anhalt, in which Magdeburg is located and where the AfD is predicted to perform well.
