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Saudi authorities have repeatedly warned Germany about the man they say carried out Friday’s attack on a Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg that left five dead and dozens injured, according to German security officials.

Officials said Riyadh had alerted German authorities to the suspected attacker, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, a Saudi dissident who described himself as an ex-Muslim, boasting on social media that ” something big will happen in Germany”. It is unclear whether police acted on the warnings.

Al-Abdulmohsen’s numerous posts on the social media site X have revealed him to be a fierce critic of Islam who has railed against Muslim immigration to Europe and in recent months has shown growing hostility towards the authorities. in German, which he accused of trying to censor him.

Five people were killed and more than 200 injured on Friday night when a man crashed into a Christmas market in Magdeburg. Al-Abdulmohsen, the suspected attacker, was arrested at the scene. Authorities described him as a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia who came to Germany in 2006 and worked as a psychiatrist in Bernburg, south of Magdeburg.

The attack darkened the mood in a country already struggling with a deep economic collapse and a round of political uncertainty following the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s shaky three-party coalition government in November.

It comes nearly eight years after an Islamic State militant plowed a truck into a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 and injuring 49 in one of Germany’s worst terror attacks.

Scholz visited Magdeburg on Saturday, calling the incident a “terrible act” and vowing that “no stone will be left unturned” to investigate the crime.

Al-Abdulmohsen is an activist who publicly renounced Islam after leaving Saudi Arabia and created a website to help opponents of the regime in Riyadh – especially women – flee the country and apply for of asylum in Europe.

His interviews and social media posts have revealed him as a militant critic of Islam who harbors sympathy for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party that strongly opposes Muslim immigration.

In recent months he has become increasingly hostile to Germany, and has been critical of tough hate speech laws that ban incitement against certain religious or ethnic groups.

He gave several interviews to German newspapers about his activism in 2019, describing himself in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as “the most aggressive critic of Islam in history”. “If you don’t believe me, ask the Arabs,” he said.

“After 25 years in this business, you’d think nothing would shock you,” wrote Peter Neumann, a terrorism expert at King’s College, London, in X. “But a 50-year-old Saudi ex- Muslim who lives in East Germany, loves the AfD and wants to punish Germany for its tolerance towards Islamists – that’s not on my radar.

In one of the 2019 interviews, he said that he “separated” from Islam in 1997.

“I find life in Saudi Arabia a test, you have to pretend to be a Muslim and follow all the rituals,” he said. “I knew I could no longer live in fear and when I realized that even anonymous activism would put my life in danger as an ex-Muslim in Saudi, I applied for asylum.”

On the other hand, he said he wrote posts criticizing Islam on an internet forum run by jailed activist Raif Badawi and subsequently received threats on his life.

“They want to ‘slaughter’ me when I return to Saudi Arabia,” he said. “It would not have been reasonable to expose myself to the danger of having to return and then be killed.”

In recent months, he appears to have moved away from activism and moved to rail against the German authorities, peddling conspiracy theories more often associated with the nationalist right. In some posts he alleged that he was censored and persecuted by the German authorities.

In a post on X in November setting out “the demands of the Saudi liberal opposition” he called on Germany to “protect its borders against illegal immigration”.

“It has become apparent that Germany’s open borders policy is (former chancellor Angela) Merkel’s plan to Islamize Europe,” he wrote. He also asked Germany to repeal sections of its penal code that he claimed “limit . . . freedom of speech” by “making it an offense (sic) to insult or degrade religious doctrines or practices”.

His X profile features a machine gun and claims that “Germany is chasing Saudi asylum-seeking women, inside and outside Germany, to destroy their lives”.

In an interview earlier this month with an anti-Islam blog he accused the German authorities of conducting a covert operation to hunt down ex-Muslims in Saudi while giving asylum to jihadis in Syria.

In recent months his messages have taken on a more threatening tone. “I assure you: if Germany wants war, we will have it,” he wrote to X in August. “If Germany wants to kill us, we will kill them, die or go to prison with pride.”