The driver of the Christmas car attack in Germany killed six people and was personally sentenced to life in prison

A Saudi doctor was sentenced to life in prison in Germany on Friday for killing six people and injuring hundreds, after he drove a rented BMW into crowds at a historic market in the eastern city of Magdeburg days before Christmas 2024.

The defendant, identified as Taleb A. in accordance with German privacy laws, was a psychiatrist from Saudi Arabia, described by officials as having a history of anti-Islamic rhetoric and far-right sympathies.

The attack has shocked the country and fueled tensions over immigration charges, just months before the February 2025 general election.

“Throughout the trial, the defendant has shown that he has a personality disorder, which was also confirmed by an expert witness,” said court spokesman Christian Loeffler in a statement.

“This means that he puts himself at the top of everything. He only sees himself and not the suffering of other people.”

Prosecutors have charged a man with killing six people and attempting to kill hundreds more in an incident they say lasted one minute and four seconds and was planned for several weeks. Five women aged 45 to 75 and a nine-year-old boy died.

Life sentence with ‘exceptional gravity’

The defendant appears to have acted out of dissatisfaction and frustration with the outcome of the civil law dispute and his failure to win various criminal appeals, prosecutors said, believing that he acted alone.

The court imposed a life sentence based on “extraordinary gravity,” meaning a person would normally be ineligible for parole after the standard 15 years and face a much longer prison term.

The defendant has been working as a psychiatrist at a clinic specializing in the rehabilitation of drug addicts in Bernburg, 40 kilometers from Magdeburg, since March 2020, but he has been absent from work for two months when he was attacked due to vacation and illness.

At first, the attack drew comparisons on social media to the deadly attack by an immigrant at a Berlin Christmas market in 2016, but the focus quickly shifted to his pursuit of the accused against Islam.

The defendant is disruptive, struggling to appear in court

He has appeared in many media interviews in 2019, reporting on his struggle work helping Saudis who had turned their backs on Islam to flee to Europe, although the exiled Saudi group reported that they quarreled with him, saying that he was alone and had problems working with others.

In a July 2019 BBC documentary, he talked about setting up the wearesaudis.net platform after he became an atheist and sought asylum in Germany.

Local media reported that the defendant expressed remorse, protested and was asked by the judge to make a brief statement during the trial.

The spokesperson of the court on Friday said that the defendant has been removed from the trial of this case whenever he fails to behave properly, and if he goes on a hunger strike and says that he does not deserve to be tried, his proceedings continue in his absence.

The defendant also left video messages on the X social media platform on the day of the attack.

In his commentary, he blamed Germany’s supposedly liberal diversity for the death of Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher, and blamed the police for stealing a USB stick from him and destroying a criminal complaint he had filed.

Holger Muench, the president of the criminal police office, said that Germany received a warning from Saudi Arabia from 2023 about the suspect, which the investigating authorities found to be unclear.

A large number of affected people joined the trial as co-plaintiffs, represented by approximately 40 lawyers. A special temporary court building had to be built to house them in Magdeburg, where the defendant stood in a glass enclosure on Friday, guarded by masked men.