Anger grows at catalogue of failures in Berlin attack

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BERLIN, Dec 22, (Agencies): German authorities came under fire Thursday after it emerged that the prime suspect in Berlin’s deadly truck attack, a rejected Tunisian asylum seeker, was known as a potentially dangerous jihadist. Prosecutors have issued a Europewide wanted notice for 24-year-old Anis Amri, offering a 100,000-euro ($104,000) reward for information leading to his arrest and warning he “could be violent and armed”.

A temporary residence permit believed to belong to Amri, alleged to have links to the radical Islamist scene, was found in the cab of the 40-tonne lorry that rammed through a packed Christmas market in Berlin Monday, killing 11. The twelfth victim, the hijacked truck’s Polish driver, was found shot in the cab. The daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung said that investigators had also found Amri’s fingerprints on the door of the truck.

In a sign of defiance, Berliners flocked to the Christmas market at the central Breitscheid square which reopened for the first time since the articulated truck cut a swathe of death and destruction through the festive crowd. Organisers dimmed garish lights and turned down the party music but began serving mulled wine and opened the traditional market huts, as visitors left a sea of flowers and candles for the victims and signs reading “Love Not Hate”. Amid an unobtrusive police presence, stony-faced vendors embraced each other, some weeping as they opened their stands.

The chairman of the Berlin association of market vendors, Michael Roden, admitted he had struggled with the decision to resume operations. “We are still stunned and deeply shocked. Our thoughts are with the injured, the dead and their families,” he said. “In a situation like this, it’s very difficult to know what the right thing to do is.” The attack, Germany’s deadliest in recent years, has been claimed by the Islamic State group.

Among the confirmed dead were six Germans and an Israeli woman, Dalia Elyakim, 60. A total of 48 people were injured. Italy on Thursday confirmed that one of its nationals, a young woman called Fabrizia Di Lorenzo, also died in the attack. But as the manhunt intensified, questions surfaced about how the suspect had been able to slip through the net, avoiding arrest and deportation despite being on the radar of several security agencies. “The authorities had him in their crosshairs and he still managed to vanish,” said Der Spiegel weekly on its website. The top-selling daily Bild’s frontpage headline screamed “Deportation Failure!” while local tabloid B.Z. said starkly “They knew him. They did nothing” next to a photo of the darkhaired Amri. Conservative lawmaker Stephan Mayer, a critic of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal stance on asylum, told public radio that the case “held up a magnifying glass” to the failings of her migration policy. But Armin Laschet, a deputy leader of Merkel’s Christian Democrats, placed the blame with regional security authorities, calling their inability to keep tabs on Amri “shocking”.

In a revelation likely to stoke public anger, German officials said they had already been investigating Amri, suspecting he was planning an attack. The interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia state, Ralf Jaeger, said counter-terrorism officials had exchanged information about Amri, most recently in November, and a probe had been launched suspecting he was preparing “a serious act of violence against the state”. Berlin prosecutors said separately that Amri had been suspected of planning a burglary to raise cash to buy automatic weapons, “possibly to carry out an attack”. But after keeping watch on him from March until September this year they failed to find evidence of the plot, learning only that Amri was a smalltime drug dealer, and the surveillance was stopped. Since the attack, police have searched a refugee centre in Emmerich, western Germany, where Amri stayed a few months ago, as well as two apartments in the capital.

The New York Times reported, citing US officials, that Amri had done online research on how to make explosive devices and had communicated with IS at least once, via Telegram Messenger. He was also on a US nofly list. Der Spiegel reported that German government wiretapping against “hate preachers” had indicated that Amri had offered to carry out a suicide operation but that his statements were too vague for prosecutors to use.

In his impoverished Tunisian hometown, Anis Amri drank alcohol and never prayed, his brothers say. Then after joining the wave of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, he ended up in an Italian jail, only to emerge an utterly changed man. Now he is prime suspect in this week’s attack on a Berlin Christmas market and two of his brothers, Walid and Abdelkader, fear the failed asylum seeker may have been radicalised by radical Islamists while he spent almost four years behind bars. “He doesn’t represent us or our family,” Abdelkader told Sky News Arabia. “He went into prison with one mentality and when he came out he had a totally different mentality.” German police have yet to establish who drove a truck into the market stalls on Monday, killing 12 people, though the interior minister said there was a “high probability” it was Amri. Abdelkader however said he was sure his brother — who turned 24 on Thursday — was innocent of the crime. Whether or when Amri was radicalised has also yet to be proved. But in Oueslatia, a rural town that lives mostly off agriculture, the brothers said something had profoundly changed Amri after he made the dangerous sea crossing to Italy five years ago as a teenager. “When he left Tunisia he was a normal person. He drank alcohol and didn’t even pray,” Walid told the TV channel. “He had no religious beliefs.

My dad, my brother and I all used to pray and he didn’t.” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said on Thursday that investigators had found the fingerprints of Amri, who is being hunted across Europe, on the truck’s door. “If he did this, it is a dishonour to us. But I am sure that he did not do it. He went to Europe because of social reasons, to work and to help our family,” Abdelkader told reporters. A weeping Walid said their last contact had been 10 days ago. “We were in touch with him through Facebook and by telephone and he has no relation to terrorism,” he said.

A senior Italian police source told Reuters that Amri arrived on the island of Lampedusa, probably after being rescued at sea, in February 2011. Amri’s crossing, made shortly after the overthrow of Tunisia’s autocratic president in the first of the “Arab Spring” revolts, followed a route that tens of thousands of other boat migrants have since taken. Amri was at a shelter on Lampedusa when migrants started a fire, destroying parts of it to protest against being held there. He told authorities he was a minor, though documents now indicate he was not, and he was transferred to the Sicilian city of Catania, where he was enrolled in school.

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