In the middle of an interview with an MDR television crew, Ahmad A. laughs – and speaks with frightening coldness about the terrorist attack in Magdeburg on the 20th December 2024. Six people were killed and over 300 injured in the attack on the Christmas market. A.’s comment: ‘It’s a shame that more people didn’t die.’ The Bild newspaper had previously reported on the unbelievable interview.
A. went on to say: “It was an act of revenge for personal reasons. Anyone who had the same thing happen to them would take revenge in the same way. What he did was a simple normal action, quite simple,” said the 24-year-old, who comes from Mecca and arrived in Germany in 2016. According to him, the attack was unfinished. It would be better to kill more people so that the pain is like the pain that he experienced, that I experienced, that every Saudi refugee here has experienced.”
The recordings are from an interview on the MDR programme ‘Exakt’. In it, Ahmad A., a suspected radicalised Islamist, expresses his approval of the attack carried out by his friend Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen. The 50-year-old from Saudi Arabia crashed a car into the crowd at the Christmas market. For Ahmad A., this is obviously no reason to mourn. On the contrary: what his friend did was ‘perfectly okay’, he says.
He explains to the reporter team that the perpetrator ‘felt persecuted – by the authorities, by society’. Apparently justification enough for him. Ahmad A., also from Saudi Arabia, berates the German authorities in the interview, speaks of an alleged war against Saudis and even announces his own revenge – because of his rejected asylum application. Ahmad A., the Islamist interviewed, appeared in Tarek Al-Abdulmohsen’s data records, which he had leaked to numerous journalists.
Ahmad A. was known to the police and was registered in Erfurt. He worked as a psychologist. But when the MDR team informed the authorities after the interview, he had already disappeared – he had been in hiding since the day of the interview. The MDR research also reveals: There are currently 561 known dangerous individuals across Germany – and there is even disagreement between the federal states as to who is even considered to be one.