Taleb bin Jawad bin Hussein Al-Abdulmohsen (born 5 November 1974) is a Saudi-born former psychiatrist and mass murderer who perpetrated a car attack on the Christmas market of Magdeburg on 20 December 2024, which killed 6 people and injured 309 others. Abdulmohsen is known for his Islamophobic views, anti-immigration stance, and far-right political beliefs. He has identified himself as a vocal critic of Islam in various interviews.
Abdulmohsen relocated to Germany in 2006 to specialize in psychotherapy, applied for asylum, which was granted in 2016. In 2013, fined him for "disturbance of public peace through the threat of criminal acts".
In June 2026, Abdulmohsen was convicted of six counts of murder and 338 counts of attempted murder and sentenced for life.
Early life and education Talib Jawad Al-Abdulmohsen was born in Hufuf, Saudi Arabia, in 1974. He hailed from a Shiite family in the largely Shiite Al-Ahsa Governorate.
He pursued medical studies and specialized in psychiatry.
Career In 2006, at age 32, Abdulmohsen relocated to Germany to specialize in psychotherapy. He later applied for asylum, because he was threatened with death for renouncing Islam.
In 2016, Germany granted him asylum, citing concerns over his safety and rights if he was returned to Saudi Arabia. Even though Abdulmohsen was wanted by Saudi Arabia on charges related to terrorism and human trafficking, specifically allegations of facilitating the trafficking of individuals from Saudi Arabia and Gulf states to the European Union, the German government refused to extradite him, citing a lack of due process in Saudi Arabia. In 2023, Saudi Arabia issued an Interpol Red Notice for Abdulmohsen's extradition.
In 2020, Abdulmohsen accused four fellow Saudi nationals of working for the Saudi government and running a fraud operation by providing women seeking to leave Saudi Arabia with invalid passports. The same year, Abdulmohsen was accused of being involved in smuggling women out of Saudi Arabia. The British National Crime Agency requested information on Abdulmohsen from German law enforcement, citing the allegations against Abdulmohsen, which included human trafficking, acquisition of forged identity documents, and participation in people smuggling operations. The request was declined for lack of burden of proof. In June 2022, the United Kingdom warned the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) about Abdulmohsen, as he had boasted about smuggling forced labourers into the United Kingdom on his Twitter account. His criminal conviction for threat and a prior investigation against Abdulmohsen by Landeskriminalamt Saxony-Anhalt were acknowledged, but the BKA again stated that no evidence for human trafficking by Abdulmohsen had surfaced.
Since March 2020, he worked as a doctor in the Federal Penitentiary at Bernburg, a state prison for drug rehabilitation. Since the end of October 2024, he was no longer on duty due to holidays and illness.
Abdulmohsen's qualification as a health professional was questioned by colleagues, but the hospital management took no action. He had in several cases prescribed false and dangerous medications to patients, whose lives were only saved by attentive nurses. Patients had refused to be treated by him for his insufficient command of the German language, which led to misunderstandings. For his consultation of a search engine for every diagnosis, coworkers told the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung he had been nicknamed "Doctor Google".
2024 Magdeburg car attack
On 20 December 2024, Abdulmohsen allegedly drove a vehicle into a crowded Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, killing 6 people, and injuring 323 others. He was arrested at the scene.
Trial and sentencing On 10 November 2025, Abdulmohsen's trial began at Landgericht Magdeburg. The proceedings were set for 46 court dates.
On his first court appearance, Abdulmohsen admitted to driving the car during the attack and made incoherent statements about "politicians, violence against women in his village in Saudi Arabia, religious hostilities" and held "tirades about police and media", at one point referencing the 2026 Saxony-Anhalt state election and what he termed "#MagdeburgGate". In December 2025, Abdulmohsen entered a week-long hunger strike in protest of his trial, during which time court dates proceeded without his presence. The statements, along with the attack itself, have been characterized as a means to "elicit attention for self-perceived injustices" by the prosecution.
It was determined that Abdulmohsen had planned the attack since August 2023, after he was fined by a court in Cologne, having threatened the judiciary in charge shortly after the ruling via e-mail, which stated that "the German people would pay an enormous price" for perceived mistreatment of Saudi dissidents. In his final summation before the verdict, Abdulmohsen claimed "torture in jail" claiming staff were poisoning his food, provided him with hard mattresses, and failed to fix unsealed air ducts. Observers noted that Abdulmohsen did not talk about the car attack and had never expressed remorse for his actions. A court psychiatrist diagnosed Abdulmohsen with narcissistic personality disorder and characterised him as an attention seeker. On 26 June 2026, Abdulmohsen was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to life imprisonment, with preventive detention. Judge Dirk Sternberg noted that Abdulmohsen sought revenge for narcissistic injury he experienced after losing the lawsuit against the Atheist Refugee Relief organisation and that he intended to kill as many people as possible to draw attention to himself and his personal issues.
Personal life and political views Abdulmohsen lived in Bernburg, about 50 kilometers south of Magdeburg and has been described as an introvert with limited social interactions. Saudi dissidents who knew him personally describe him as isolated and aggressive.
Upon coming to Germany in 2006, he was first registered in Hamburg from March that year until January 2008, when he left the country for nine months, causing his residence permit, which had been granted to him for the purpose of his studies, to expire. When he returned to Hamburg in October 2008, authorities granted him a Duldung (toleration) visa for three months, which he overstayed until May 2009. In November 2007, he reportedly commenced an unpaid training at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf which, according to the same report, had been terminated after staff had expressed concerns about his behaviour and his reaction to criticism of it. From May 2009 until February 2010 he lived first in Düsseldorf and then in Bochum; in Bochum, he received in August 2009 a residence permit for training purposes.
From 2011 to the beginning of 2016, Abdulmohsen lived in Stralsund, where he completed parts of his specialist training. In 2013, a few days after the Boston Marathon bombing, according to the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Ministry of the Interior, he threatened the Medical Association of the state with an attack in the course of disputes over the recognition of examination results for his specialist training. This was followed by a search of his apartment, during which electronic media were also checked. However, the investigators found no evidence of "real preparation for an attack". In the same year, he was sentenced by the Rostock District Court to 90 daily rates of ten euros each for threatening criminal offenses. In January 2014, he is said to have appeared at the local office and asked for financial support. He is said to have threatened both an attack and suicide. The police then sought him out for a threat assessment. In September 2015, he is said to have called the German Chancellery and a month later the judicial authorities, complained about the Rostock verdict and became abusive.
In media appearances, Abdulmohsen has presented himself as an ex-Muslim activist against Islam.
In February 2019, Der Spiegel reported on him, that he would – through his web forum wearesaudis.net and X (then known as Twitter) – help others escape from Saudi Arabia to Germany. In March 2019, Abdulmohsen gave interviews to the Frankfurter Rundschau and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in which he was presented as an escape/migration helper. In these he said about himself, "I am the most aggressive critic of Islam in history. [...] There is no good Islam." Also in 2019 Abdulmohsen appeared on the BBC showcasing his website intended to help asylum seeking apostates, "especially from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region". He founded an online platform to help Saudi Arabian citizens apply for asylum in Germany and claimed that Germany was giving asylum to "Syrian jihadists."
The Cologne-based Atheist Refugee Relief had originally considered working with Abdulmohsen to coordinate aid for atheist refugees from Saudi Arabia. However, this cooperation failed. The Secular Refugee Aid stated that in 2019, members of the refugee aid organization filed a complaint against Abdulmohsen "after the most vile slander and verbal attacks," which led to a legal dispute lasting several years, which Abdulmohsen lost in the Cologne Regional Court in August 2023. At the time of the attack, the case was on appeal before the Higher Regional Court of Cologne. The Atheist Refugee Relief said that Abdulmohsen was not a member of the organization and claimed that he made many false "accusations and claims" against them and their former board members. It also distanced itself from Abdulmohsen "in the strongest terms" and added that its members filed a criminal complaint against him following “the most foul slander and verbal attacks" in 2019.
Saudi authorities have warned German security authorities about Abdulmohsen at least three times between November 2023 and December 2024, but the warnings were ignored, after he posted extremist views on his X account threatening peace and security. The Foreign Intelligence Service of Germany had received a report from Saudi Arabia that Abdulmohsen had announced something big in Germany as early as 2023 and are said to have followed up on this tip. In the fall of 2023, a woman who had been in contact with Abdulmohsen via the Internet tried to warn the police in Berlin that Abdulmohsen wanted to kill 20 Germans. However, she sent her email to the police in Berlin, New Jersey.
In February 2024, the Berlin Public Office accused him of abuse of emergency calls, because he had placed an emergency call for the fire brigade in the building of the Berlin police without an emergency. A criminal order was issued with 20 daily rates at 30 euros each. He did not appear for the hearing on 19 December, one day before the attack.
In an X post from 5 December 2024, Abdulmohsen declared that Angela Merkel deserved the death penalty for "her secret criminal project of Islamizing Europe" and criticized her policies that according to him would have seen German women face similar restrictions as seen in Afghanistan. He also reposted "claims from Alice Weidel warning of a future under Sharia law in Germany, framing her fight as a defence against Islamic dominance." Saudi Arabia issued charges against him for alleged terrorism and facilitating the smuggling of women from Gulf countries to Europe. Despite these allegations, Germany granted him asylum in 2016 and refused to extradite him to Saudi Arabia.
Abdulmohsen shared pro-Israel content on his X profile, he also published a post claiming that "Parts of Syria were lucky enough to join Israel", retweeting a post made by Benjamin Netanyahu which celebrated the fall of Assad.