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Berlin
attacker manhunt ends in shootout but questions remain
Authorities
face questions after Anis Amri manages to travel over 1,000 miles
around Europe in spite of arrest warrant
Stephanie
Kirchgaessner in Rome, Philip Oltermann and Jad Salfiti in Berlin,
and Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
Friday 23 December
2016 19.02 GMT
The hunt for
Europe’s most wanted man ended in a gun battle outside a Milan
train station in the early hours of Friday but left authorities
facing tough questions about how an armed suspected terrorist had
been able to travel hundreds of miles on public transport before
being caught.
Italy’s interior
minister, Marco Minniti, said on Friday that the man shot in Milan
was “without a shadow of a doubt” Anis Amri, who is suspected of
carrying out Monday’s terrorist attack on a Berlin Christmas
market. Fingerprints of the shot man matched those secured from
within the cabin of the truck used to carry out the attack, German
authorities confirmed.
Amri was stopped by
two police officers in a routine check in the Sesto San Giovanni
neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city and was asked for his
documents, Minniti said. Amri initially told the officers he did not
have documents and that he was from Calabria. When pressed further,
Amri slipped his hand into his bag and retrieved a .22-calibre gun,
shooting 36-year-old officer Christian Movio in the shoulder.
A second officer,
29-year-old Luca Scatà, returned fire, shooting Amri in the chest.
The Tunisian 24-year-old reportedly died of his wounds about 10
minutes later, in spite of attempts at resuscitation.
Movio remains in
hospital with a wound to his shoulder that is not life-threatening.
Minniti said he told the wounded officer “Italians will be able to
have a happier holiday. All of Italy should be proud of him … It’s
not simple to guarantee an adequate level of security faced with the
threat of terrorism, but we are putting everything into it.”
Angela Merkel, who
was alerted to the news of Amri’s death by the Italian prime
minister, Paolo Gentiloni, on Friday morning, thanked the Italian
officers and said she had asked for an investigation into “each and
every aspect of the case of Mr Amri”. Wherever there was a need for
a political or legislative change, it would be done speedily, the
German chancellor said.
The fact that a man
whose terrorist leanings were known to German spy agencies had
dropped off their radar before the attack and managed to evade police
while travelling at least 1,000 miles around the continent in spite
of a European arrest warrant raised difficult questions for security
agencies and politicians across Europe.
Paris-based web
portal Monde Afrique on Friday claimed the Moroccan intelligence
agency had twice alerted German authorities to Amri’s “fervent”
support for Islamic State and his contact with two of their
representatives in advance of Monday’s attack, once on 19 September
and again on 11 October.
A video posted on
Friday by Isis’s Amaq news agency, in which Amri pledged his
allegiance to Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and called for Isis
supporters to take revenge against “crusaders” bombing Muslims,
appeared to be shot with a mobile phone on the Kieler bridge in
Berlin’s Moabit district, just over a mile from the German
chancellery.
Berlin truck attack:
first suspect released as driver thought to still be at large – as
it happened
Doubts raised over
whether detained man was truck driver who killed 12 people and
injured 48 at Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz
Read more
The bridge is also
located only a short distance from the ThyssenKrupp warehouse near
where Polish truck driver Łukasz Urban on Monday parked the
articulated lorry that was used to plough into the Breitscheidplatz
Christmas market later that evening.
“It simply cannot
be the case that someone like Amri was able to move around Germany
freely even though he was suspected of planning a terrorist attack,”
said Michael Ortmann, a terrorist expert for broadcaster RTL.
“Our intelligence
agencies have fallen asleep at the wheel,” Ortmann told the
Guardian, pointing to the fact that Germany had experienced a lack of
terrorist activity for many decades since the decline of the Red Army
Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. Spy agencies were
often understaffed and technologically behind the times, he said,
making it difficult for regional police to share data.
How Amri managed to
travel from Berlin in the north of the continent to Milan in the
south remains unclear. German and Italian media reported that a
French rail ticket was found in Amri’s backpack, suggesting that he
had boarded a train in the city of Chambéry in the northern French
Alps, near both the Swiss and Italian borders. From Chambéry, Amri
appeared to have travelled by train for two and a half hours to the
northern Italian city of Turin, before taking another train to Milan.
French media on
Friday offered a different theory, reporting that Amri had travelled
from Lyon to Chambéry by train, then a direct high-speed TGV to
Milan.
Travelling directly
from Germany to France by train, Amri would have run a considerable
risk of detection. After last year’s thwarted train attack in which
a 27-year-old Moroccan jihadi opened fire on a Thalys train from
Amsterdam to Paris, security on certain French and international
train services has been stepped up, with passengers having to go
through metal-detection scanners on some platforms. But not all train
services or stations scan passengers before boarding.
According to
Tagesspiegel newspaper, Berlin police had calculated that their
suspect would have been unable to travel far beyond the German
capital’s borders, citing eyewitness reports according to which
Amri had sustained visible facial injuries during Monday’s attack.
However, several
companies run coach services from the centre of Berlin to the French
Alps. FlixBus, for example, runs a coach service that departs at
11.45pm on Monday from Berlin’s central station and arrives in
Annecy, near Chambéry, at 8.10pm the following day.
Though passengers
are required to carry a valid passport to board such coaches, their
ID documents are checked only by the driver, who is not usually
qualified to verify their authenticity. FlixBus declined to comment
on whether Amri could have travelled on board one of its buses,
referring the Guardian to the criminal investigator.
By the time Amri
arrived in Milan, he reportedly had only a couple of hundred euros
left in his wallet, which has led Italian investigators to presume he
had been hoping to hide nearby. Italy was familiar territory to Amri,
and that may explain why he headed back to the country following
Monday’s attack. He is believed to have arrived in Italy as one of
tens of thousands of Tunisians who entered the country after the Arab
spring protests in 2011.
Merkel said she had
spoken to the Tunisian president and that progress had been made in
the process of sending back Tunisian refugees who had no right to
stay in Germany. “We can be relieved that one acute threat has come
to an end, but the threat that comes from terrorism – that is a
general threat – continues,” she said.
|
Merkel
to review security after Berlin attack
“We
will press ahead with examining whether certain state measures need
to be changed,” the German chancellor said.
By JANOSCH
DELCKER 12/23/16, 5:32 PM CET Updated 12/23/16, 7:43 PM CET
BERLIN — Just
hours after Anis Amri, the suspect in the Christmas market attack in
Berlin, was killed in a shootout with authorities in Milan,
Chancellor Angela Merkel faced up to German security agencies’
failure to prevent the massacre.
“We will press
ahead with examining whether certain state measures need to be
changed,” Merkel said in a press conference on Friday. “The Amri
case raises lots of questions. Not only questions about the deed but
also about the time leading up to it ever since he arrived in
Germany.”
Amri, a Tunisian,
arrived in Germany in July 2015 and was denied asylum a year later
but wasn’t deported, despite having spent four years in an Italian
prison, raising questions about the efficiency and lack of
coordination between Germany’s many security agencies.
German security
services have identified as many as 550 people as willing and able to
commit terrorist attacks, so-called Gefährder, which roughly
translates as “individuals likely to endanger public safety.”
That number is 110
higher than last year, but whether that’s because more people are
being radicalized, or authorities are getting better at finding them,
is unclear.
After finding Amri’s
identification card inside the truck used in the attack, authorities
“quickly determined that he is an Islamist Gefährder,” Holger
Münch, chief of the Federal Criminal Office (BKA), told journalists.
Around half of the
so-called Gefährder are not currently in Germany, and roughly 80 are
behind bars, leaving almost 200 at large in the country, the Interior
Ministry confirmed to POLITICO.
A spokesperson for
the ministry confirmed the numbers but said it could not provide
further details about whether authorities are monitoring the
suspects. “‘At large’ is your choice of words,” he said.
The fact that Amri
was killed by authorities “unfortunately doesn’t change the
terrorist threat in Germany,” Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière
said on Friday. “It remains high.”
When it comes to
monitoring suspects, authorities are partly hamstrung by stringent
privacy laws as well as the logistical challenge of observing
hundreds of people around the clock in disparate locations.
Furthermore, many of
the Gefährder known to authorities may never have committed a crime.
Instead, authorities have been alerted to them because of suspicious
behavior, such as expressing extremists views in internet forums, or
having traveled to destinations in Syria or Iraq or elsewhere.
Italian police stand
by the body of suspected Berlin truck attacker Anis Amri
Berlin attacker was
part of German ISIL network: CNN
Given the privacy
laws, German law enforcement can only put people under surveillance
for a limited amount of time before they have to go back to court to
get approval again for the surveillance.
In the case of Amri,
authorities observed him for months, according to Berlin’s state
prosecutor. However, this surveillance was terminated in September,
after previous observations had not yielded enough evidence to
continue it, according to media reports.
But the logistical
constraints are also an issue.
Sebastian Fiedler,
the deputy chief of Germany’s Criminal Police Union (BDK), told the
news website Tagesschau.de that in order to observe one person around
the clock, roughly 40 police officials are necessary, making it
“virtually impossible” to observe all Gefährder in the country
with the available resources.
“In the state of
North Rhine-Westphalia alone, we are talking about around 200
people,” Fiedler said. To observe them around the clock, “we
would need about 8,000 police officers, which is more than a third of
all officers in the state.”
Nevertheless, as
more and more apparent flaws in monitoring the suspected perpetrator
of Monday’s attack are emerging, Merkel and de Maizière appear
willing to reassess security regulations.
On Friday, a
spokesperson for the German justice ministry confirmed that they were
drafting a regulation for electronic ankle bracelets for suspects who
have previously been convicted.
“In these times of
great challenges we will do everything possible for our state to be a
strong state,” Merkel said.
At the same time,
she stressed that any toughening up of security measures would not
happen at the expense of democratic values and civil liberties.
“Our democracy,
our state is based on the rule of law,” she said. “Our values and
our humanity are the alternatives to the hateful world of terrorism,
and they will be stronger than terrorism.”
Authors:
Janosch Delcker
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