Authorities in Germany on Monday released details of past threats made by the suspected perpetrator of the deadly car rampage through a Christmas market in Magdeburg.
According to the Ministry of Justice in the north-eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the suspect identified as Taleb A implied that he would commit acts of violence on two occasions prior to the attack on December 20, which killed five people and injured around 230.
Angered at what he saw as slow processing of his request to take a specialist examination, the doctor in April 2013 had threatened in a telephone call with an employee of the medical association that something would happen that would attract international attention.
“He asked the employee whether she had seen the pictures from Boston. Something like that would happen here too,” the ministry said.
One day earlier, on April 15, three people were killed and 260 injured in the bombing of the Boston Marathon.
The Rostock Public Prosecutor’s Office then reportedly applied to the district court for a search warrant for Taleb A’s flat in the city of Stralsund, which was granted.
However, no weapons, other dangerous objects or bomb-making materials were found in the home of the man, a Saudi national who has now lived in Germany for nearly 20 years.
Later, Taleb A wrote a letter to the Public Prosecutor General in August 2015, stating, among other things: “From a purely postmodern philosophical point of view, you are dirty bacteria that should soon be destroyed to protect the German people from the danger you are.”
He cited a “moral duty” to destroy articles of the German constitution that refer to the administration of justice in Germany and the position of judges.
“I am prepared to pay my whole life for that. It is only a question of time. But it won’t take long. The whole world will be talking about it,” he was quoted as saying in the letter.
However, the ministry reported on Monday that the deletion of some files meant that it was not possible to access the outcome of that investigation.
The 50-year-old suspect remains in custody during what Interior Minister Nancy Faeser pledged would be an exhaustive clarification of the events leading up to the attack.
“All the background must be thoroughly and precisely investigated. Every stone will be turned over here,” Faeser said on Monday after a special session of parliament’s Committee on Internal Affairs in Berlin.
“It is now a matter of piecing together all the findings that paint a picture of this perpetrator.”
Faeser said that the man “does not fit any previous mould” and that there were striking indications of a pathological psyche.
That is why thousands of statements made by him on the internet were being examined, as well as information and proceedings that had been brought before various authorities, she said.
It was important to draw the right conclusions as to “how such information must be evaluated and summarized in future in order to be able to intervene in good time,” emphasized Faeser.
