A German court has sentenced Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen, a 51-year-old Saudi Arabian national, to life in prison for the deadly attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg in December 2024. The presiding judge, Dirk Sternberg, read out a verdict covering six counts of murder, 206 counts of attempted murder, and hundreds of counts of bodily harm — a list so extensive that its reading took more than half an hour. Six portrait photographs of the victims were placed on the front tables in the courtroom: five women aged between 45 and 75, and a nine-year-old boy.
On the evening of 20 December 2024, Al-Abdulmohsen drove a rented BMW X3 into crowds at the busy Christmas market in central Magdeburg, an eastern German city, at speeds of up to 48 kilometres per hour. The attack lasted just 62 seconds, but left around 300 people injured in addition to the six who were killed. He was arrested at the scene. The trial, which opened last November and ran for 41 sessions hearing more than 100 witnesses, was held in a specially constructed temporary courthouse to accommodate the large number of victims participating as co-plaintiffs — more than 200 survivors and bereaved relatives.
Prosecutors and the court found that Al-Abdulmohsen had planned the attack well in advance, walking the route through the market multiple times before the attack and reserving the vehicle he would use. His motive, the court concluded, was primarily personal rather than ideological. A psychiatric expert testified that he suffered from narcissistic personality disorder. According to the judge's reasoning, the attacker had lost civil court cases against a secular refugee support organisation in Cologne and came to view those legal defeats as evidence that German judges and prosecutors were effectively supporting Saudi Arabia's government against him. He had announced plans for "revenge against the German people" in online messages as early as November 2023. On the day of the attack, he repeatedly checked his emails hoping a media outlet would respond to interview requests he had sent — none did. He picked up the vehicle at 4 p.m.
Al-Abdulmohsen arrived in Germany on a scholarship in 2006 and was granted asylum in 2016, having claimed he faced persecution in Saudi Arabia for his criticism of Islam and the ruling family. He is from the Shia Muslim minority in Hofuf, a city in eastern Saudi Arabia. In Germany he worked for years as a psychiatrist, most recently at a secure psychiatric facility, though he had been registered as unfit for work in the period before the attack. Despite his own anti-Islamic rhetoric, he had also publicly expressed support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party.
Judge Sternberg noted that Al-Abdulmohsen showed no remorse, had boasted about the attack weeks afterward, and posed a continuing danger to the public. While the court reserved the possibility of preventive detention following any future release review, it stopped short of formally imposing it, as German law requires a prior conviction or multiple offences — conditions not met in this case. Al-Abdulmohsen has the right to appeal. The attack prompted Germany to tighten security measures at Christmas markets across the country.