Federal prosecutors say the man, who was identified as Redouane S. due to privacy laws, was part of the network around Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who is suspected of planning the November 13, 2015, attacks in Paris.
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A “suspicious person”-later identified as a 23-year-old Pakistani refugee-was arrested near the scene soon after, police said, while the passenger-the truck’s original driver-was reportedly found dead at the scene with gunshot and stab wounds”.
Anis Amri, 24, was accused of killing 12 people and wounding dozens more in Monday’s assault on a Christmas market, which has been claimed by the Isis jihadist group.
A man believed to be the suspect in the Berlin Christmas market truck attack was killed in a shoot-out in a suburb of the northern Italian city of Milan on Friday, a security source told Reuters.
“It took a while before the federal police turned to Amri as a suspect”, it said. Frank said the investigation “continues with high intensity”. Instead of pulling out an identity card, Amri produced a loaded.22 caliber gun, shooting a senior officer in the shoulder before a rookie officer killed him with a single shot.
He is said to have arrived as a refugee in Germany in February, Efe news agency reported.
While using vehicles for terror isn’t a new concept, the threat level of these internationally inspired attacks has certainly increased, especially during the 2016 holiday season.
He had no ID, no phone and only a pocket knife on him, as well as the loaded 22-caliber pistol he used to shoot Movio, police said.
“‘If he can see me now, I would tell him ‘you should not have done this, ‘” Walid Amri told the Associated Press.
Merkel said that she spoke to Tunisian President Beji Caid Essibsi on Friday about speeding up the deportation of failed asylum seekers.
“They must have done something to my driver”, he told TVN24.
The attack, Germany’s deadliest in recent years, has been claimed by the Islamic State group. Five people were wounded in an ax rampage on a train near Wuerzburg and 15 in a bombing outside a bar in Ansbach, both in the southern state of Bavaria. 86 people were killed in the attack. The anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has gained support in the last two years as the chancellor’s popularity has waned, said on Tuesday that Germany is no longer safe.
Christmas markets have been a known potential target for Islamist militants since at least 2000, when authorities thwarted a plot to attack one in Strasbourg, France. The leader of the Alternative for Germany party, Marcus Pretzell, tweeted on Monday: “It is Merkel’s dead!”
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Twelve people were killed and 48 others injured when a truck plowed into a popular Berlin market Monday evening.
