Tunisian detained in Berlin attack

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

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A m r i i s s a i d t o h a v e 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 flflee, 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 offiffice 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.

T h i s j u mbl e d s t a t e o f affairs — a reaction to the abuses of centralized power under fascist and communist governments — has frequently been criticized.