Terror suspect fatally shot
The Tunisian man suspected of carrying out the Berlin truck attack was shot dead by police in Milan yesterday, Italy confirmed. Anis Amri, 24, was accused of killing 12 people and wounding dozens more in Monday’s assault on a Christmas market.
THE Tunisian man suspected of carrying out the Berlin truck attack was shot dead by police in Milan yesterday, Italy confirmed.
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 Islamic State jihadist group.
Italy’s interior minister Marco Minniti told a press conference in Rome that Amri had been fatally shot after firing at police who had stopped his car for a routine identity check around 3am.
Identity checks had established “without a shadow of doubt” that the dead man was Amri, the minister said.
Amri had been missing since escaping after Monday’s attack in central Berlin. He had links to Italy, having arrived in the country from his native Tunisia in 2011.
Shortly after his arrival in Italy he was sentenced to a four-year prison term for starting a fire in a refugee centre. He was released in 2015 and made his way to Germany.
German police said Amri steered the 40-tonne truck in the attack after finding his identity papers and fingerprints inside the cab, next to the body of its registered Pol- ish driver who was killed with a gunshot to the head.
A Europe-wide wanted notice had offered a 100,000euro ($104,000) reward for information leading to Amri’s arrest.
In Tunisia, a brother of the fugitive had appealed to him to surrender and said: “If my brother is behind the attack, I say to him ‘You dishonour us’.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday she was “proud of how calmly most people reacted” to the coun- try’s deadliest attack in years.
But her assuring message failed to dampen criticism of what many politicians and newspapers slammed as glaring security failures leading up to Monday’s attack. Officials revealed that Amri was a re- jected asylum seeker with a history of crime, had spent years in an Italian jail and had long been known to German counter-terrorism agencies.
On Thursday, Berliners flocked to the reopened Christmas market.