Hunt for asylum-seeker

BERLIN: German police are looking for an asylum-seeker from Tunisia after finding an identity document under the driver’s seat of a truck that ploughed into a Berlin Christmas market and killed 12 people, officials and security sources said yesterday.

The federal prosecutor’s office offered a reward of up to 100 000 (R1,46 million) for information leading to the capture of the suspect, identified as 24-year-old Anis Amri.

“Beware: He could be violent and armed,” the prosecutor's office said in a statement in which it described Amri as 1.78m tall with black hair and brown eyes.

German police commandos raided two apartments in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg late yesterday, but did not find Amri, Die Welt newspaper reported, citing investigators.

Amri’s father and security sources told Tunisia’s Radio Mosaique that he had left Tunisia seven years ago as an illegal immigrant and had spent time in prison in Italy.

In Düsseldorf, Ralf Jaeger, interior minister of the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, said the Tunisian appeared to have arrived in Germany in July 2015 and his asylum application had been rejected.

He seemed to have used different names and had been identified by security agencies as being in contact with an Islamist network. He had mainly lived in Berlin since February. – Reuters