A RADICALISED MIGRANT MEETS A GRISLY END
Terror suspect’s journey from Berlin to Italy raises security questions
It was a routine identity check, the kind Italy has relied on to stem the flow of illegal migration deeper into Europe. But the man stopped by two police officers about 3am on Friday outside the northern city of Milan was anything but an ordinary drifter. He turned out to be perhaps Europe’s most wanted man, Anis Amri, the chief suspect in the deadly terrorist attack on a Christmas market in Berlin that killed 12 people. Asked to show his papers and empty his backpack, he pulled a gun and shot one officer, and in turn was shot and killed by the other.
“Police bastards,” Amri, who turned 24 this week, shouted in Italian before dying, according to the account given by Antonio De Iesu, director of the Milan police, at a news conference.
For Italy, the shooting death of Amri, a Tunisian who had pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State’s supreme leader in a video released by the group on Friday, spurred a moment of national pride and some reassurance that its security measures were working.
For Germany, it brought a sense of palpable relief after a week of national anguish.
“Now I can wish you all a really peaceful Christmas,” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told reporters on Friday as he thanked his Italian counterparts.
But the death also raised numerous questions about Amri’s movements and motivations as well as about the potential gaps in the security of a Europe of open borders.
Law enforcement officials issued a Europe-wide warrant on Wednesday for Amri, who migrated to Italy in 2011 and was imprisoned for four years in six different prisons in Sicily before making his way to Germany in 2015.
Italy officially classified Amri as a terrorism risk after he threatened to decapitate a Christian cellmate in prison in Palermo in 2014, according to Lorenzo Vidino, who chairs an Italian commission of experts on radicalisation that was formed this autumn.
“He was basically a troublemaker, very aggressive and very violent. And then from there, he starts a whole trajectory,” said Mr Vidino, who said that the Tunisian migrant was arrested soon after his arrival by boat on the Italian island of Lampedusa in 2011 after back-to-back arson incidents. “He establishes a track record of bad behaviour, which at the beginning was just aggressive and threatening and disrespectful. But in the last place, where he was held in a high-security prison in Palermo, he showed signs of radicalism.”
The threat to his cellmate was considered serious enough that officials added him to Italy’s database of radicalised individuals, a list that includes only a few hundred names, said Mr Vidino.
Both Italy and Germany tried to deport him to Tunisia but were thwarted by a lack of documents and cooperation from his home country.
Even after Amri was named as the prime suspect in the attack in Berlin, he was able to roam freely around Europe, his face plastered across the news media and a reward of more than US$100,000 on his head.
“This mobility is great for the law-abiding and equally great for the non-lawabiding,” said Douglas Wise, a former senior CIA officer, of the borderless travel within the European Union.
What Amri did in the four days between the attack in Berlin and when he was ultimately killed in Sesto San Giovanni is not clear, but that is now the subject of an intense investigation that the authorities remain reluctant to discuss.
Asked when exactly the authorities began to view Amri as a suspect, the head of Germany’s federal criminal police, Holger Muench, restated in general terms that it was Tuesday, after investigators found an identity document in a wallet in the cab of the tractor-trailer used in the attack.
Police have not said why the wallet was not discovered on Monday, when the attack occurred and a murdered driver was found in the cab. On Friday, Mr Muench for the first time mentioned that an alias was involved, but he said that the police had quickly linked it to Amri.
In Italy, a train ticket found on Amri’s body showed that he had travelled by train to Turin in Italy from the French town of Chambery, near the border between the two nations. But there is no trail suggesting how he got from Berlin to Chambery.
A senior European counter-terrorism official said the delay in identifying Amri probably gave him a crucial head start of several hours to flee Germany and that he would have been able to buy a train ticket to France and Italy without showing identification papers.
Facial recognition software on surveillance cameras in Europe is still in rudimentary form in most places, the official said, so even after Amri was identified, he could have slipped through the train stations undetected, especially if he was wearing a hat or hood.
Amri’s ability to hide through the week and make his way from Germany, through France, to Italy also raised questions of whether he had the help of a broader network, particularly one possibly linked to the Islamic State.
The group called Amri “a soldier” in a video released on Friday in which Amri proclaimed loyalty to its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and declared that the attack in Berlin was intended to avenge coalition air strikes in Syria that have killed civilians.
The video was evidently filmed in the Moabit district of northern Berlin. The autumn foliage seen on trees suggested it was filmed in autumn or even early December.
In Germany, Amri came on the radar of authorities in part for suspected ties to a 32-year-old Iraqi-born Salafist preacher who went by the name Abu Walaa and who was jailed just weeks ago on suspicion of recruiting fighters to join the Islamic State.
“There is high suspicion that he was behind the departure of a number of Germans to Syria — as many as two dozen — but the intelligence is not clear as to his exact role, whether in radicalisation, recruitment or terror financing,” said Laith Alkhouri, a director at Flashpoint, a business risk intelligence company in New York that tracks militant and cyber threats.
In a telephone call from the suspect’s hometown i n Tunisia, Amri’s older brother, Walid, said that the family wondered whether he became radicalised while in jail in Italy. After his brother was released, he informed the family that he was leaving for Germany with friends he had made in jail, Walid Amri said.
Also unknown is whether Amri had any accomplices in the Berlin attack — a question Peter Frank, Germany’s top federal prosecutor, identified as a priority.
“It is very important now to determine if there was a network of cooperators, a network of supporters, accessories or assistants helping him to prepare the attack, execute the attack and also to escape,” he said.
The only uncertainty that seemed to be settled on Friday was that the man killed was indeed Amri.
“There is absolutely no doubt that the person who was killed was Anis Amri, the suspect in the terrorist attack in Berlin,” Italian Interior Minister Marco Minniti said. “As soon as this person entered our country, he was the most wanted man in Europe, and we immediately identified him and neutralised him. This means that our security is working really well.”
Some analysts, however, said Amri’s flight over 72 hours from Germany to Italy through France underscored Europe’s porous border controls. “Terrorists with multiple false identification documents are able to exploit Europe’s open borders. Just as Amri arrived in Europe and moved almost seamlessly around the continent before the Berlin attack, he was able to do the same after it,” said Seth Jones, a terrorism specialist at Rand Corp.
Amri travelled from Turin, Italy, to Central Station in Milan, where he arrived about 1am on Friday. Surveillance cameras recorded Amri’s movements. It was not clear how Amri made his way to Sesto San Giovanni, about 7km away.
Sesto San Giovanni is a “a strategic hub for transportation”, the town’s deputy mayor, Andrea Rivolta, said. “Sesto is a junction for the railway system, the Milan metro, municipal buses and buses that reach all of Europe.”
When police officers stopped him and asked for identification, Amri responded, in good Italian with a North African accent, that he was not carrying any documents. They asked him to empty his pockets and backpack. He was carrying a small knife and the equivalent of a few hundred dollars, but no cellphone. But then he pulled out a pistol.
“It was a regular patrol under the new system of intensified police checks on the territory,” a spokesman said. “They had no perception it could be him, otherwise they would have been more careful.”
The officer whom Amri shot, Cristian Movio, was wounded in the shoulder and had surgery on Friday. The officer who shot Amri was identified as Luca Scata.