‘Here
in our country’
German
security always said it wasn’t a question of if but when terrorism
would strike. Now it has.
By JANOSCH
DELCKER 12/20/16, 10:17 AM CET Updated 12/21/16, 4:07 PM CET
BERLIN — For
years, German security officials have feared it was only a matter of
time before the country joined the list of European states shaken by
a broad-scale terrorist attack. On Monday, those fears appeared to
have been realized.
A truck plowed into
a crowd gathered at a traditional Christmas market in central Berlin,
killing at least 12 people and injuring dozens more. Berlin police
said on Twitter that investigators believed the truck was
intentionally driven into the crowd in what was “probably a
terrorist attack.”
A suspect was
arrested Monday evening and interrogated before being released on
Tuesday. Police said in a statement that “investigations thus far
have not produced urgent suspicion against the suspect.”
Authorities have
repeatedly warned of the risk of a terror attack in Germany.
Earlier this month,
Chancellor Angela Merkel said in her weekly government video
broadcast that recent successes in the fight against Islamic State
had “in turn, increased the risk [of a terrorist attack] here in
our country, as aggression is on the rise.”
Merkel’s statement
followed a warning issued by the EU’s law enforcement agency
Europol at the beginning of December that some intelligence services
estimated “several dozen people directed by IS may be currently
present in Europe with a capability to commit terrorist attacks.”
Europol added that “in addition to France and Belgium, all other EU
member states that are part of the U.S.-led coalition against IS may
be targeted by terrorists.”
Germany’s Federal
Crime Office (BKA) is monitoring 530 so-called Gefährder,
radicalized individuals who officials suspect may commit serious
crimes such as a terror attack or murder, Holger Münch, the BKA’s
chief commissioner, said during an annual conference in November.
Although authorities
have not confirmed whether the perpetrator of Monday’s attack was
an Islamic terrorist or an asylum seeker, the case will likely fuel
debate over the potential security risk related to the arrival of
more than a million migrants since the fall of 2015.
Between 4.4 and 4.7
million Muslims live in Germany, making up roughly 5.5 percent of the
country’s 82.2 million residents, according to an estimate this
month by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, a subdivision
of the Interior Ministry. Almost a third have recently moved to
Germany, with around 1.2 million Muslims having entered the country
between May 2011 and the end of 2015.
Two months ago,
Germans authorities apprehended a Syrian refugee who allegedly cased
a Berlin airport for a bombing attack and committed suicide in his
jail cell after being captured. A series of four non-related violent
attacks made headlines over the summer, three of which were carried
out by asylum seekers and two of which had links to Islamist
terrorism.
The
AfD is now likely to turn the Christmas attack into one of its
central topics in the campaign against Merkel.
Increasingly,
Merkel’s open-door response to the refugee crisis in 2015 has
frustrated Germans, leading to a surge in popularity for the
far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party,
which climbed to 12 percent support in polls today from 4 percent in
September 2015.
At the same time,
Germans grew more fearful of a terror attack — in a July survey, 73
percent said they were afraid, and 61 percent believed the recent
influx of refugees into Europe had increased the risk of an attack.
Campaigning largely
on these fears, the AfD surpassed Merkel’s conservatives for the
first time in a regional election in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern last
September.
With Germany’s
national election coming up next year, the AfD is now likely to turn
the Christmas attack into one of its central topics in the campaign
against Merkel, who announced she would contest the chancellorship
again.
Just moments after
news broke of the attack on Monday evening, Marcus Pretzell, the
AfD’s candidate in next year’s regional election in the state of
North Rhine-Westphalia, tweeted: “When will this damned hypocrisy
end? These are Merkel’s fatalities.”
The AfD is not
Merkel’s sole concern. Once the initial shock wears off, critics
from within her own ranks could use the Berlin attack to push her to
get tougher on security.
Merkel’s Christian
Democrats Union (CDU) is traditionally seen as the party of law and
order. Politicians within the CDU, as well as in its Bavarian sister
party Christian Social Union, have accused Merkel of eroding their
credentials with many of her decisions during the refugee crisis.
Just last week, Thomas Strobl, the CDU’s regional interior minister
in Baden-Württemberg, publicly demanded stricter screening for
asylum seekers.
When it comes to
counter-terrorism efforts, the legal status of Germany’s security
services — with police and intelligence acting independently from
each other under the Trennungsgebot (law of separation) — poses
unique challenges, and the decentralized structure slow authorities
down, experts have warned.
“Although
Germany’s security strategies and concepts have been improved,
they’re still slowed down by bureaucracy, weaknesses in the
information management, legal obstacles and by the way the apparatus
is structured,” Jürgen Storbeck, a former director of Europol,
which coordinates the response to organized crime and terrorism, told
POLITICO a year ago.
Security and rescue
workers tend to the area
Security and rescue
workers tend to the area | Michele Tantussi/Getty Images
Over the course of
the year, particularly following the summer’s spate of attacks, the
German government announced various initiatives to improve
cooperation between its forces, while at the same time, Merkel and
her government visibly toughened their stance on migrants.
In August, Interior
Minister Thomas de Maizière announced plans to speed up the
deportation of foreign criminals, to create a “four-figure number”
of new security jobs, and to give police in the county more equipment
and greater powers of surveillance.
Whether these moves
are enough to assuage the critics within her ruling coalition and
soothe Germans’ fears remains to be seen.
“Our security
authorities need to be able to do proper background screenings, and
they need data for that,” the CSU’s Manfred Weber, who heads the
conservative EPP group in the European Parliament, told public
broadcaster ZDF Tuesday morning.
Weber called for
tougher security and a better exchange of information between law
enforcement authorities in Europe. “They need to be able to analyze
who is coming to us, and what’s central for that is linking the
data between the national authorities in Europe.”
This article has
been updated.
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