Magdeburg Christmas market attacker receives maximum life sentence

A German court has handed down the maximum sentence to the man who drove into a Christmas market in Magdeburg in 2024, killing six people, convicting the Saudi defendant of murder and sentencing him to life imprisonment, while also finding exceptional gravity of guilt. 

The Magdeburg Regional Court reserved the right to order preventive detention at a later stage. The verdict is not yet final.

A technical fault disrupted the sentencing. The defence counsel pointed out that the presiding judge's words could not be heard inside the glass booth where the defendant sits, prompting the court to suspend the reading of the verdict while the technical problems were resolved.

On December 20, 2024, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen drove a hire car weighing more than 2 metric tons and producing 340 horsepower at speeds of up to 48 kilometres per hour through the busy Christmas market in the central German city. A 9-year-old boy and five women died, and hundreds of people were injured, some seriously. 

The Saudi man at the wheel was arrested at the scene immediately after the attack.

More than 200 people affected by the attack were represented as joint plaintiffs in the trial. Many of them attended the sentencing, and almost all seats in the public gallery were filled. Given the scale of the trial, the state of Saxony-Anhalt, of which Magdeburg is the capital, had a temporary lightweight courthouse specially constructed.

The public prosecutor's office had called for a life sentence, a finding of exceptional gravity of guilt and preventive detention. The joint plaintiffs supported the call for the maximum sentence. The defence argued that the conditions for ordering preventive detention had not been met.

Attack was planned long in advance, prosecutors said

The public prosecutor's office said the man from Saudi Arabia had planned the attack long in advance. He had not pursued any serious ideological goals but had acted primarily out of personal motives, prosecutors said. "The defendant was and is only concerned with himself," they added.

A psychiatric expert had assessed the man as having a narcissistic personality disorder and an enormous need for attention.

The perpetrator had been granted asylum in Germany many years ago and received his specialist medical qualification there. Until shortly before the attack, he worked as a psychiatrist in a forensic psychiatric facility for mentally ill offenders in the town of Bernburg in Saxony-Anhalt.

He has portrayed himself as an activist for the rights of Saudi women. For years he was in dispute with a Cologne-based refugee aid organization and repeatedly clashed with authorities.