Berlin attacker was known to police; spotlight turns to associate
NAN-F-8
Attacker
Berlin, Jan. 5, 2017 (dpa/NNA) The man who mounted last month’s deadly terrorist attack in Berlin had 14 aliases and was well known to the German security authorities, officials said on Thursday.
Reports say investigators have stepped up their probe into one of his associates.
The aliases used by Anis Amri, a 24-year-old Tunisian national who ploughed a truck into a crowded Berlin Christmas market on Dec. 19, are set out in a report by criminal investigators.
The report was presented to the parliament in Germany’s Western State of North Rhine-Westphalia.
“The attack was carried out by a man whom security officials across Germany were very well aware of,” State Interior Minister Ralf Jaeger told a special meeting of the state’s parliamentary interior committee.
Authorities now consider the Tunisian associate of Amri, detained on Tuesday on fraud charges, as dangerous.
They believe he was a member of the Salafist Islamic movement and was capable of taking radical action, German media reported.
The 26-year-old man had dinner with Amri in a Berlin restaurant the night before the attack which killed 12 people.
“The two men held an intensive conversation,” according to Frauke Koehler, a spokeswoman for the federal German prosecutors’ office.
The report also said that the two men travelled together from Italy to Germany last year, with Amri having since then divided his time between Berlin and North Rhine-Westpahlia.
Dieter Schuermann, who heads up North Rhine-Westpahlia’s state criminal office, told the committee that had the state and federal authorities had investigated concerns that Amri could mount a terrorist attack.
However, he said that they had failed to find concrete evidence of any plans.
Video cameras at various railway stations have helped investigators trace Amri’s journey across Europe after he fled the scene of the attack in Berlin.
He was shot dead by Italian police near Milan on Dec. 23, 2016.
Amri was a former petty criminal and drug dealer-turned-Islamist.
Amri was filmed by a surveillance camera at a Berlin railway station raising his finger in an Islamic State salute shortly after he drove the truck into the Christmas market.
Authorities issued an arrest warrant for the 26-year-old suspected accomplice on suspicion of fraud involving Germany’s laws for asylum seekers between April and November 2016.
A resident of a Berlin refugee shelter, he had two aliases and had been under investigation since earlier this year.
Koehler had said on Tuesday that prosecutors were now “investigating him for possibly participating in the attack,” adding that investigators suspected he may have known about Amri’s plan.
However, prosecutors have so far failed to establish a case that the 26-year-old Tunisian was involved in the Berlin attack, she said.
A spokesman for Berlin’s state prosecutor said that the 26-year-old suspect had previously been detained on suspicion of supplying explosives intended for a possible attack in Dusseldorf.
He was freed after investigators found no evidence against him. (dpa/NAN)
Edited by Celine-Damilola Oyewole/Muhammad Suleiman Tola