Tunisian detained in Berlin attack

He may be an accomplice in truck attack that killed 12.

BERLIN — A 40-year-old Tunisian man has been detained as a possible accomplice of Anis Amri, the man identified as the terrorist who carried out a truck attack on a Berlin Christmas market that killed 12 people, German officials said Wednesday.

The Tunisian was held in Berlin, news agencies reported, after a search of a home and offices associated with the man, whose name was not released. Information about him was found in the cellphone of Amri, a 24-year-old Tunisian, who was killed Friday during a shootout with police officers outside Milan.

The development on Wednesday was announced by the office of Peter Frank, the public prosecutor general.

“The investigations indicate that he could have been involved in the attack,” Frank’s office said in a statement, adding that officials expected to know by late today if there were grounds to press criminal charges. “To what extent suspicions about the arrested person will be firmed up remains to be seen, after further investigation.”

The truck attack on Dec. 19 was Germany’s deadliest terrorist episode in decades. The Islamic State claimed responsibility and released a video in which Amri pledged his allegiance to the group’s supreme leader.

But it is not known if Amri had accomplices. Nor is it clear precisely how Amri made his way back to Italy, where he lived from 2011 to 2015.

Amri is said to have careened into a Christmas market at the symbolic Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin just after 8 p.m. on Dec. 19. Police initially detained a Pakistani man who was found to have no connection to the truck and thus the assault. The error ended up giving the suspect a head start of almost 20 hours to flee, before investigators scouring the cab found a migration document that led to Amri.

Amri, who had a history of petty crime and used several aliases in his odyssey around Europe, applied for asylum in Germany in April. His application was rejected in June, and he was ordered deported, but he managed to slip through the cracks.

He may have benefited from Germany’s decentralized political system. Power is spread over 16 states, and police, judicial and migration officials have distinct spheres of authority.

For example, Amri was detained for two days in the southern German town of Friedrichshafen on July 30, after trying to take a bus to Zurich, when police noticed he was under deportation order. But an office for registering foreigners in Kleve, in the far northwest of Germany, which was responsible for the order, said it did not have the papers from Tunisia necessary to carry out the deportation, so Amri was ordered released.

Adding to the confusion, on leaving jail in the south, he gave an address in Karlsruhe, in the southwest — hundreds of miles from Kleve.

This jumbled state of affairs — a reaction to the abuses of centralized power under fascist and communist governments — has frequently been criticized.