Last Friday’s atrocity at a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany had all the hallmarks of a jihadi attack. It was lethal, indiscriminate and utterly horrifying, transforming a boringly familiar object — a car — into a weapon of mass murder. Jihadist groups have been calling for such attacks for well over a decade now, and scores of their supporters have carried them out with deadly effect. A very similar attack to the one in Magdeburg happened in 2016 in Berlin, when Tunisian-born Anis Amri rammed a truck into a group of pedestrians, killing 12 and wounding 56 others.

But Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, the sole suspect, isn’t a jihadist. He isn’t even a Muslim, but instead an apostate from Islam, having left the fold some years ago. To my knowledge, and I’ve written a book on apostasy, this makes him the first ever ex-Muslim to launch a terrorist attack.

Unlike most ex-Muslims, who remain closeted about their apostasy, Abdulmohsen was open and highly vocal about his and had even planned to write a book setting out his reasons for leaving. To say that he was a stern critic of Islam is an understatement. Indeed, he loathed it with all the intensity that only a former believer can muster. In doing so, he aligned himself with some unsavoury bedfellows. On X, he voiced support for Germany’s anti-immigration party, the AfD, and defended the British Right-wing activist-jailbird Tommy Robinson. He also reposted tweets from a brazenly racist account whose main shtick is to circulate inflammatory videos about Islam and black people.

This seems to have befuddled quite a few people, and some have sought to characterise Abdulmohsen as a figure of the far-Right. Terrorism expert Peter Neumann, for example, observed in a widely shared post on X: “If anything, the #Magdeburg attacker Taleb A. was far right: a self-declared Islam-hating, ex-Muslim atheist, who despised German society not for being against Islam but facilitating its spread. He also very much liked the AfD.” Maryam Namazie, a British-Iranian ex-Muslim activist, concurred. On X, she wrote: “Abdulmohsen, a Saudi-born doctor and self-proclaimed ex-Muslim atheist activist, starkly illustrates that right-wing extremism knows no racial, cultural, or religious boundaries.”

If only it were that straightforward. Even the most cursory glance at Abdulmohsen’s online chatter shows that his politics cannot be reduced to any one ideology. He was, though, fixated with the theory that the German system of asylum prioritises religious Muslims from Muslim-majority countries over secular ex-Muslims fleeing persecution from those same societies. Specifically, he was convinced that Germany has a two-tier system of asylum which unjustly favours Syrian Muslim refugees over secular Saudi ones. If this is a politics of the far-Right, it is a very strange one, especially given the far-Right’s implacable opposition to asylum of any kind.

Indeed, Abdulmohsen is more a single-issue terrorist who does not really align with any particular coherent ideology. In this respect, he is the murderous embodiment of a new threat that terrorism experts have been warning about for some time and which they refer to as “MUU”, an acronym for extremist ideologies that are “mixed, unstable or unclear”. According to the UK Home Office, MUU refers to “instances where people exhibit a combination of elements from multiple ideologies (mixed), shift between different ideologies (unstable), or where the individual does not present a coherent ideology”. Terrorism researchers Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens and Moustafa Ayad have even written of “an age of incoherence”, noting a growing number of extremists who share “beliefs across ideologies like jihadism and white supremacism”.

In his lack of a clear ideology, Abdulmohsen in some ways resembles Luigi Mangione, whose politics resist any clear and easy categorisation. Mangione also seems to have been radicalised and deranged by a very specific grievance, which was to do with the US healthcare industry and how it prioritised profits over patients.

Unlike Mangione, Abdulmohsen’s victims were random; but like him, he may have thought that murderous violence was the only way to draw maximum attention to his cause. That he had failed to make any notable impact through the medium of the written word and his non-violent political activism was painfully obvious to him. But, according to his perverse terror-logic, mass murder would give him a voice.

In the coming days and weeks we will no doubt find out more about Abdulmohsen and what he thought and felt about any number of issues. But it’s far from certain that what is recovered will yield a coherent picture, much less one that can fully explain the horrifying violence he unleashed.