Italy searches homes connected to Berlin terrorist
Police release suspected accomplice in deadly truck attack
ROME (Reuters) – Italian police have searched three houses in and around Rome, where the man suspected of killing 12 people last week at a Christmas market in Berlin may have spent time, a judicial source said on Thursday.
Anis Amri, a Tunisian, first arrived in Europe by boat to the Italian island of Lampedusa in 2011, and was shot dead by police in Milan four days after the December 19 attack in Berlin.
The searches focused in the capital and nearby Acilia, where he was thought to have stayed after leaving a detention center in Sicily in 2015, the source said. Police are investigating whether he was seeking to stay in Italy or trying to reach another country.
On Thursday, during an end-year news conference, Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni said Amri was probably radicalized after arriving in Europe in 2011, but added that the government had no evidence Amri had “particular networks” in Italy.
“Five years ago he was not a jihadist... In desperation, in isolation, in alienation, he found the conviction to follow the path of radicalization,” Italy’s anti-terrorism chief Franco Roberti was quoted as saying in an interview with la Repubblica newspaper on Thursday.
Roberti said lone-wolf attackers like Amri needed the help of smallscale criminal networks, such as those in Italy and Spain, for logistical support including acquiring false documents.
“From this point of view, Italy and Spain are the cradles,” Roberti said.
Amri’s undetected passage to Italy, via France, from Germany after the attack, has prompted euroskeptic parties to call for the reintroduction of border controls that were removed by the continent’s open-border Schengen pact.
Italy tried to deport him to Tunisia after he completed a four-year jail term for attempting to set fire to a building, but Tunisian authorities refused to take him, so he was released from the center.
Meanwhile on Thursday, German authorities released a Tunisian man detained on suspicion of involvement in the truck attack.
“Further investigation has shown that the arrested person was not the possible contact person of Anis Amri and therefore he was released,” Frauke Koehler said, referring to the man believed to have hijacked the truck and plowed it into crowds at a Christmas market in the capital last week.
Investigators found the mobile phone number of the released 40-year-old Tunisian stored in the phone of Amri.
The spokeswoman said that a gun Amri used in the truck had the same caliber as the one he fired at Italian police in Milan, where he was shot dead last week. More tests were needed to determine whether it was the same gun.
She added that the truck’s automatic breaking system stopped the vehicle 70 to 80 meters after it hit the market, avoiding more casualties.