The German parliament’s interior committee was questioning security and intelligence officials on Monday over leading up to a .
Five people were killed in the attack and some 200 others were injured when an individual drove a rented BMW sport utility vehicle through a crowd of revelers.
Police arrested 50-year-old Saudi psychiatrist Taleb A. at the scene.
German authorities are facing accusations of missing clues and failing to provide security ahead of the December 20 attack in the eastern city of Magdeburg.
What did the interior minister say?
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser and officials from the state of Saxony-Anhalt — of which Magdeburg is the capital — addressed the lawmakers on Monday.
During the hearing, Faeser said there were “striking signs of a pathological psyche” coming from the alleged attacker. However, she noted that the motive has yet to be established.
The suspect, A. was born in Saudi Arabia. He is a psychiatrist by trade who arrived in Germany in 2006 and was granted refugee status 10 years later. A. had thousands of followers on social media, where he often criticized Islam and Germany’s relationship with it. He also had a history of brushes with the law and court appearances in the European country, and Saudi Arabia said it had repeatedly warned German officials about the suspect.
With the suspect posting “tens of thousands of tweets” over many years, Faeser said, some material has not yet been fully examined. She added that “every stone is being turned.”
“That explains why not everything is on the table yet… who knew about which clues and what was passed on when must be carefully clarified,” she said.
At the same time, the minister said that even a fuller picture of all the data would likely “not have prevented” the incident.
The Magdeburg attack was similar in execution to previous jihadist ones in Berlin and in the French city of Nice in 2016, although A. had previously voiced strongly anti-Islam views and .
History of threats
Also on Monday, officials from the German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania published data that showed that the suspect made at least two violent threats against German officials before the tragedy in Magdeburg.
In 2013, he allegedly threatened an employee of a medical association over delays to his specialist exam, insinuating that consequences could be similar to . This reportedly prompted the local prosecutor’s office to issue a search warrant for his home, but the officials did not find any dangerous or illegal objects or materials.
In 2015, Taleb A. wrote to Germany’s prosecutor general, calling him a “dirty bacteria that should soon be destroyed to protect the German people from your danger.”
Call for accountability
Following the Monday hearing, lawmaker Konstantin Kuhle from the business-friendly FDP party said that “the federal and state authorities knew this perpetrator” but no one had connected all the dots.
Gottfried Curio of the far-right AfD went a step further, saying that “[e]verything was foreseeable for everyone.”
“What we need are deportations, instead we get naturalizations,” he said “What is needed now is a change in security policy in this country.”
Ahead of the event, domestic policy spokeswoman Irene Mihalic, a member of the parliament’s intelligence committee, said she expected a comprehensive review of the way that information had been used.
“We expect that the exact sequence of events before, during and after the attack, the flow of information and responsibilities will be presented in the most precise way,” Mihalic told the RND publishing group.
“We owe this to the relatives of the victims and the many injured — also to the public, who can rightly expect that no one will evade responsibility,” explained Mihalic, who chaired the investigative committee on a 2016 truck attack on a Christmas market in Berlin.
The , and the business-focused , formerly part of the coalition government, have called for enhancements to Germany’s security apparatus, including improved coordination between federal and state authorities.
rc/nm (AFP, dpa)
The post German security chiefs grilled over Magdeburg attack appeared first on Deutsche Welle.
