Newly released dashcam video shows moment of Berlin Christmas market attack. [H/T: Bild]
BERLIN – Police in Germany and across Europe intensified the manhunt Thursday for the prime suspect in this week’s Berlin Christmas market attack, as Europeans faced the prospect of a holiday season with the “violent and armed” Tunisian still at large.
German authorities found a fingerprint of the 24-year-old suspect, Anis Amri, inside the cabin of the truck that crashed Monday into the market, providing further evidence linking him to the terrorist attack that killed 12 and wounded dozens, German interior minister Thomas de Maizière told reporters in Berlin.
The discovery appeared to reduce the likelihood that Amri’s wallet and identification – both found in the vehicle – had been planted evidence to create a false trail.
The fingerprint find – first reported by consortium of German media including Süddeutsche Zeitung and local broadcasters – was confirmed to The Washington Post by a senior security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The prints, the official said, were found on the outside of one of the truck doors.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, facing a political crisis over her open-door policy on migrants last year – when the suspect arrived in Germany – described the on-going efforts to find him on Thursday as “brilliant” and lauded Germans for their response to Europe’s latest terrorist strike.
But German authorities also face difficult questions about why Amri was still free despite being the subject of past terrorism probes and having alleged contact with a suspected Islamic State recruiter. A German news magazine, Der Spiegel reported, also reported that Amri was heard once on a tapped phone offering to carry out a suicide attack.
“I have been very proud in the past few days how calm and collected the majority of people reacted to this situation,” she said following multi-departmental briefings at Berlin’s Joint Counter-Terrorism Center.
In a sign of both resilience and newfound caution, the targeted market near Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in fashionable west Berlin prepared to reopen for the first time since the carnage.
New cement barriers were placed to protect the entrances – another reminder of the stark interplay between security concerns and public life that has become a hallmark of the age of random attacks and threats.
The family of the 24-year-old suspect – who had a long record of criminal behavior prior to his rejected asylum request in Germany this year – issued an appeal for his surrender.
“I ask him to turn himself into the police,” Abdelkader Amri, his brother in Tunisia, told the Associated Press. “If it is proved that he is involved, we dissociate ourselves from it.”
A senior official with knowledge of the investigation confirmed the first non-German death in the tragedy. An Israeli woman, the official said, was among those killed.
Amri had been the subject of a terror probe and new details emerged about the extent of previous knowledge of the suspect as a possible threat.
Several months ago, German authorities intercepted alarming remarks made by Amri on the phone, Der Spiegel reported. Investigators had been wiretapping phones in connection with investigations into Islamic hate preachers when they overheard a conversation in which Amri offered to carry out a suicide attack. But authorities could not arrest him, according to the report, because he had made his statement in too “convoluted” a way.
Amri also had claimed to be Egyptian, and to have suffered persecution there, when applying for asylum in Germany in April, the report said. When officials asked him questions about his alleged home country, however, he was unable to answer most of them. The authorities found that he had been registered under several aliases and birthdays. His asylum request was subsequently rejected.
The suspect became the subject of a national manhunt after investigators discovered a wallet with his identity documents in the truck used in Monday’s attack, two law enforcement officials told The Post. Among those injured were two Americans, said a statement from the U.S. Embassy in Berlin.
German authorities issued a 100,000 euro ($105,000) reward for information leading to his capture, warning citizens not to approach the 5-foot-8, 165-pound Amri, whom they described as “violent and armed.”
Amri, officials said, was not part of the surge of migrants who entered Europe via the onetime main route from Turkey and Greece – a path that has been now largely cut off.
Rather, he came to Germany last year via Italy, where he apparently had entered as early as 2012. He applied for German asylum but was rejected in June and later faced deportation.
Amri was the subject of a terrorism probe on suspicion of “preparing a serious act of violent subversion,” and he had known links to Islamist extremists, authorities said.
The dragnet for the suspect appeared to initially focus on the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia as well as Berlin, both places where the Tunisian suspect once lived.
The interior minister in North Rhine-Westphalia, Ralf Jäger, said the Tunisian man had bounced around Germany since arriving in July 2015, living in the southern city of Freiburg and later in Berlin.
Although authorities have sought to accelerate the deportation of rejected asylum seekers this year, there is still a backlog in Germany of tens of thousands, many of whom are able to resist because their countries of origin refuse to take them back.
Amri had not been deported because – like many asylum seekers in Germany – he did not have a passport. The Tunisian government, Jäger explained, initially denied that he was a national and delayed issuing his passport. Pending his deportation, Amri had received a “toleration” status from the government.
Amri’s new Tunisian passport, Jäger said, finally arrived Wednesday.
Authorities also knew that Amri had “interacted” with Abu Walaa, a 32-year-old of Iraqi descent arrested in November on charges of recruiting and sending fighters from Germany to the Islamic State.
According to Karen Müller, spokeswoman for the Berlin prosecutor, Amri had also been under police surveillance for several months until September of this year, because he was suspected of planning a burglary in Berlin to finance the purchase of weapons. The suspicion wasn’t confirmed. He was, she said, found only to be a small-time drug dealer.
Revelation of the asylum seeker’s background sparked outrage among conservative politicians and seemed set to damage Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is running for reelection next year.
(c) 2016, The Washington Post · Anthony Faiola, Stephanie Kirchner, Souad Mekhennet
