BERLIN – Police forces in Germany and across Europe accelerated efforts Thursday to track and catch a 24-year-old 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.
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 an assailant crashed a truck loaded with steel through its stalls, killing 12 and wounding dozens.
New cement barriers were placed to protect the entrances, marring its festive panorama.
The family of the suspect – who had a long record of criminal behavior prior to his rejected asylum request in Germany this year – issued an appeal.
“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.
The suspect – identified by police as Anis Amri – 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 Washington Post.
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.”
His record, however, further deepened the political fallout from Monday’s bloodshed – pointing to flaws in the German deportation system and putting a harsh light on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s humanitarian bid to open the nation’s doors to nearly 1 million asylum seekers last year.
Although the vast majority of those who flooded into Europe were on the move to escape war and unrest, dozens of terrorism suspects have slipped into Germany and neighboring nations posing as migrants. 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.
Importantly, authorities 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 Merkel, who is running for reelection next year.
There were also growing calls for the deployment of more police on the streets with military-style weapons – an unusual move in pacifist Germany. At the normally quaint and picturesque Christmas markets in at least three German cities – Mainz, Magdeburg and Dresden – concrete barriers were quickly erected to add security. In Magdeburg, police officers armed with automatic weapons were guarding the entrance.
Featured Image: AFP/Getty
