German security forces faced a series of difficult questions at Saturday’s press conference in Magdeburg. Friday night’s attack, in which Talib A.*, a 50-year-old Saudi man rammed a car into a crowd at a busy Christmas market in the Saxony-Anhalt capital, left five people dead and 200 more injured.
As senior police officers and city officials faced the press, some reporters grew impatient with the lack of clear answers to their questions: How could police fail to protect the Christmas market? How come apparent warnings from Saudi authorities were not heeded? How did disturbing social media posts by the suspected perpetrator fail to raise alarm bells?
Just two days later, many of these questions clearly remained difficult to answer, though consequences have already been drawn: Federal and state police forces convened a conference on Saturday morning, agreeing to increase police presences and reassess safety measures at the many hundreds of Christmas markets across the country.
Christmas market security
The most immediate question pertained to concrete safety plans. The Berlin Christmas market attack of December 2016, when 13 people were killed by a Tunisian asylum-seeker who drove a truck into a crowd, resulted in two parliamentary inquiries and immediate safety upgrades: Heavy concrete blocks, road blocks, and increased police presences were introduced at markets throughout Germany and Austria.
But it appears that the markets, which attract thousands of people and appear in almost every available space in German cities in the 5-6 weeks leading up to Christmas, can never be totally secured from vehicles — partly because emergency vehicles also need to be able to access the market, and because there need to be multiple emergency exits for people to escape.
“The places that the perpetrator used were the emergency access routes and the emergency exits,” Ronni Krug, a Magdeburg city official, told reporters on Saturday, before referring to the Duisburg Love Parade incident of 2010, when 21 were killed in a crush partly because there weren’t enough emergency exits. He added that the security plan at all of Magdeburg’s Christmas markets had been “created according to the best knowledge,” and that security plans for such markets were continually updated.
Hans-Jakob Schindler of the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), an international nonprofit policy advice organization, was not entirely satisfied with this explanation. But he acknowledged that the security plan in place — a combination of physical barriers, police officers on the ground, and security cameras — was a classic concept used for all major public events.
“The most obvious and glaring thing is the physical barriers at Christmas markets: There should not be a gap in those physical barriers that let cars in that are not supposed to go in,” he told DW. “Even if they were only left open temporarily, the perpetrator apparently knew of this, because he rented a car and drove to the Christmas market — so he was aware he would get through to the market with a car.”
Tip-offs and intel failures
But this was clearly not the only failure — several holes in Germany’s security architecture had to align to allow the Magdeburg attack to happen, though assessing where exactly those holes were will take many months, if not years, to unravel.
Speaking to public broadcaster ZDF on Saturday evening, Holger Münch, head of Germany’s federal police force the BKA, described the suspected perpetrator as “atypical.” Talib A.’s social media posts suggest that he was an opponent of the Saudi regime, felt that Saudi dissidents were being persecuted by German authorities, but was also disgruntled with Germany’s liberal policy towards refugees, and had supported the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Citing anonymous security sources, the German press agency DPA reported that Saudi authorities warned their German counterparts about Talib A. last year, and had requested his extradition — though the lack of detail leaves questions around the significance of this: Did the Saudi government request his extradition because he was a regime critic, or because they saw him as a danger to public safety?
Without knowing the answers to that, it seems difficult to apportion blame, according to Schindler: “A warning is not always a warning about what is going to happen — it could be about many other things. In context, that warning may not have been as severe as it should have been.”
Nevertheless, it is clear that there had been concerns about Talib A.’s erratic behavior: In Berlin, the 50-year-old had been charged with misusing an emergency phone number following an altercation with officers in a police station in February this year. He had been due to appear at a court hearing (his own appeal against the charges) on the day before the attack, but failed to appear in court.
A warning about Talib A. had also been sent from a private citizen last year to Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF). This warning had been taken seriously, the BAMF said, and passed onto the relevant authorities.
The lack of social media moderation
The fact that Talib A.’s activities was apparently very active on social media in the past few years has raised new questions about the role of platforms like X and Facebook in tracking and driving radicalization.
Several German media outlets reported that Talib A.’s now deleted posts on X included statements that he expected to die in 2024, that he threatened to kill 20 Germans, and that he thought the German government was trying to make Europe more Islamic.
“This is a very good case to show that the classic Islamist, right-wing extremist, left-wing extremist categories have been augmented by another category of individual, who build their own ideological, personalized narratives,” said Schindler. “This has been a growing trend since the pandemic, and the social media companies are doing less than they did before. You don’t need to be a staunch supporter of IS (Islamic State). In this conspiratorial environment, any extremist narrative, when you take it to its conclusion, will inevitably lead to violence.”
Elon Musk laid off several thousand content moderators after taking over the platform, then called Twitter, in 2022. This, according to Schindler, has led to a situation where society expects increased policing in offline spaces while allowing a reckless lack of moderation on online platforms.
“We have to stop accepting that this industry, one of the most profitable in human history, has zero legal responsibility for the content on their platforms and zero legal responsibility to proactively work with the security forces,” concluded Schindler.
But any such regulation will take some time to materialize. For now, German security authorities are dealing with the immediate question of whether and how they could have stopped the Magdeburg attacker.
*Editor’s note: DW follows the German press code, which stresses the importance of protecting the privacy of suspected criminals or victims and urges us to refrain from revealing the full names of alleged criminals.
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