Thread by @ZaraRiffler

🧵🔍🧐 I asked around in the Middle East..👇 The Terror Cousin of Taleb A. :

1/12 On December 20th, Germany was once again victim of a terrible attack. Taleb A. had planned his act thoroughly: he apparently scouted out the Christmas market in Magdeburg, rented a car, and tried to kill as many people as possible. An act in the jihadist style – but in contradiction to the image that the perpetrator has tried to portray of himself for many years: an Islam-critical ex-Muslim.

Where does his radicalism come from? Not much is known about how he grew up. Insiders suspect that he has a mentally ill unpredictability within him and at the same time never completely abandoned extreme ideologies. I spoke to sources from the Arab region. According to foreign intelligence sources, Taleb A. is said to have people with extremist ideas in his family.

Among them is a man classified as an Islamist terrorist. First name: Yahya Muhammad. Last name: "AL-ABDUL-MUHSIN". In the context of his machinations, he is said to have also used the name "AL-ABU HAYDAR". Intelligence agents from the USA and the Middle East believe that he would be Taleb A.'s cousin.

2/ Taleb grew up in a Shiite family in Saudi Arabia, he comes from the Al-Ahsa region – his cousin from the village of Al Qarah.

But who was his cousin? Yahya Muhammad is said to have helped to build a financial network to support the Islamist Hezbollah. It involved a network of created companies – money couriers and front companies – to financially supply the terrorist militia with several million dollars. The companies were mainly located in the Gulf region, including Qatar. "This network had contact with very high-ranking Hezbollah leaders," said an agent.

Yahya Muhammad Al-Abdul Muhsin was therefore part of the criminal network of Ali Reda Hassan Al-Banai, who is very close to Hezbollah representatives in Lebanon and Iran. "The money was laundered through front companies. Several banks were involved. Then the money was transferred from Banai and his family to Hezbollah," the secret service agent continued.

3/ Cousin was on the terror list

In 2021, Qatar and the USA took joint action against this financial terror network. Taleb's cousin Yahya Muhammad was put on the US sanctions list - along with other terror supporters of the network: Ali Lari, Ali Al-Banai, Abd Al-Rahman Shams, Majdi Fa'iz Al-Ustadz and Sulaiman Al-Banai. The Gulf Cooperation Council classified Hezbollah as a terrorist organization back in 2016.

"Shams is the nephew of Ali Banai, who started coordinating years ago. Banai's brother, Abdul Moeed, also helped. And. Abd-al-Muhsin, in turn, is related to Ali Lari and helped manage the companies. It was almost like a family business for Hezbollah," says the agent. "Ali Al-Banai is a highly dangerous man who also has links to the terrorist group Palestinian Jihad (PIJ)."

4/ The terror cousin visited Germany!

"We know that Yahya Muhammad also stayed in Germany for a short time in the past. We don't know what he did there," said an intelligence source. "It was there in the mid-2010s, when Taleb A. had also been living in Germany for several years." Taleb came to Germany in 2006 with a visa to begin specialist training. Whether Taleb met his cousin in Germany: unclear!

5/ Does Taleb A. have a dual personality?

"When Yahya Muhammad realized that intelligence services knew about his activities, he tried to create a little deception. On social media, he pretended a few times that he had a position AGAINST the mullah regime in Iran. But the evidence of his actions for the Hezbollah network was clear“, said a source.

Taleb A. also distanced himself from his cousin on social media after he was finally arrested by Saudi security authorities in 2021. At the time, he claimed on X: "When I appeared publicly on Twitter in 2016 and announced that I had left Islam, Yahya was the person who fought against me the most. He did not shy away from insults and even threats.”

It is interesting that Taleb simultaneously claims about his cousin: “He is actually an atheist, not a religious one,” while elsewhere he says of Yahya that in 2010 Yahya said to him: “The Iranian government has the right to kill any woman who does not wear the hijab properly.”

This means that even at that time, his statements were extremely contradictory – his actions almost seem like a dual personality.

6/ The Islamists of this Hezbollah network are also active in Europe!

One of the companies that was central to the financial network for Hezbollah was the Qatar-based company "AlDar Properties", which was founded by the "AL-BANAI" family and is on the SDGT (Designated Global Terrorists) list for supporting terrorism.

The real estate company still exists today. "Members of the Al-Banai family move between the Middle East and Europe, we know that the main person, for example, often traveled to Spain. Other people to Great Britain."

7/ Documents about Taleb A. and his connections are currently being prepared in Saudi Arabia. The German investigators are to receive these files afterwards. The Saudis had sent four so-called "Notes Verbal" to Germany, three to German secret services and one to the Foreign Office in Berlin. There was no response.

What details Saudi Arabia knows about Taleb A. will apparently soon become clear. IF they provide it.If they will provide it.

8/ Was he a victim – or was he always a perpetrator himself?

It was not until 2016 that Taleb A. stated that he had been threatened with death by a diplomat, the so-called cultural attaché of the Saudi embassy – whereupon he applied for asylum in February of the same year. At the beginning of July 2016 he received a positive decision.

However, there is a second view from Saudi Arabia: Taleb allegedly offered people 10,000 Saudi riyals for anyone who could give him information about the Saudi ambassador’s place of residence – including when he was there. Whether this is true will soon become clear.

So far, we already know that Taleb acted as a potential perpetrator: he made serious threats to the medical association, referring to the terrible attack in Boston in 2013 – where three people were killed and more than 140 injured during a marathon. The Boston attack was carried out by Chechen Islamists. An ex-Muslim threatening an Islamist attack? Again, something that doesn't add up.

9/ Who did Taleb A. have contact with?

It is not known what kind of contact the Magdeburg attacker had with his terrorist cousin in the last decade. If he really did renounce Islam for a while, this could be rather unlikely.

It is also unclear to secret insiders how well Taleb A. is supposed to have had contacts with Saudi Arabian "dissidents" who are considered "extremist" by security authorities in the Middle East. There is a suspicion. This concerns several "suspicious men" who are only posing as "Saudi oppositionists". How concrete or how weak these suspicions are could also soon become clear.

10 / Taqiya? Delusion? Hatred?

Some experts believe that Taleb A.'s actions were caused by hatred and mental illness. Psychologist Ahmad Mansour explained on X: "I see neither an Islamist nor an anti-Islamic background as central. Rather, the focus here is on an irrational hatred of Germany."

Others disagree on this point. For example, the Iranian singer @MaralSalmassi - she explains in a video: "Even if he spread this misinformation himself, it is in line with the practice of Taqqiye, an Islamic doctrine that allows lies and deception to support Islamic goals. In reality, he is a radical Shiite Muslim, as his name and numerous tweets and chat leaks attest."

11/ An agent from the Middle East describes his opinion to me as follows: "From my perspective, Taleb A. could also have posed as a Saudi Arabian dissident and publicly declared himself an atheist ex-Muslim. In order to: get asylum and avoid punishment for alleged rape in Saudi Arabia. For me as an intelligence agent, the pattern of how much effort he put into his external image is too obvious. It is too meticulous to be genuine. Of course, there is also the fact that he clearly has a mental personality disorder. It could explain his meticulous actions, but it doesn't have to."

The Gulf insider goes on to explain: "Another explanation would be that he could have been SO deeply delusional that he often believed himself to be a critic of Islam - even though he was radical on the inside. As an Arab, I say: No ex-Muslim would attack a Christmas market to express his dissatisfaction with the German authorities for their treatment of Saudi dissidents. I assume that, deep down, he wanted to harm actual critics of Islamism with this attack. And of course he wanted to harm Saudi Arabia; hatred of his homeland, which is taking action against Islamism, is a common thread in his CV. The fact that he is simply mentally ill is never an explanation for people in our profession. First and foremost, he is a radical Shiite Muslim - everything else remains to be seen. In the end, there will be several explanations."

12/ The fact that parts of Taleb A.'s family are Islamist and even support terrorism raises the question: Was the man perhaps really trying to escape Islamism - but ultimately could not escape the radical thought constructs he had ingrained in him, and ended up as an Islamist in his madness (with his assassination in jihadist style)?

Or: Is he even, in a mentally ill delusion, pretending to the world that he is an Islam critic with an extremist inside him?

What Taleb A.'s real thoughts are about political Islam and about Christians: so far ONLY he himself knows...