A court in Magdeburg, Germany, handed down a life sentence on Friday to a Saudi doctor convicted of killing six people and injuring hundreds of others after he drove a rented BMW into a crowd at a historic Christmas market in the eastern German city in late 2024.
The attack, which occurred just days before Christmas, rattled the entire nation and inflamed an already heated national debate over immigration — coming just months before a general election that took place in February 2025.
The convicted man, identified under German privacy laws only as Taleb A., was a psychiatrist originally from Saudi Arabia. Officials described him as someone with a documented history of anti-Islamic rhetoric and far-right sympathies.
Prosecutors charged him with the murder of six individuals and the attempted murder of hundreds more. According to the prosecution, the attack was carefully planned over several weeks and lasted one minute and four seconds. Among those killed were five women between the ages of 45 and 75, as well as a nine-year-old boy.
Investigators believe the attacker acted alone, driven by deep frustration over the outcome of a civil legal dispute and his repeated failures in pursuing various criminal complaints, prosecutors said.
