German police have arrested four people who had been in touch with a Tunisian refugee being hunted across Europe in connection with the truck attack on a Berlin Christmas market that killed 12 people, according to local media reports.
Bild newspaper cited an anti-terrorism official as saying that authorities knew that the suspect, 24-year-old Anis Amri, was seeking accomplices for an attack and was interested in acquiring weapons, Reuters reported.
Proceedings had been opened against Amri in March based on information that he was planning a robbery to get cash to buy weapons and “possibly carry out an attack with them and other accomplices yet to be recruited,” the paper reported.
ISIS has claimed responsibility for Monday’s attack, which also injured 48 people.
In mid-2016, Tunisian authorities listened in on a conversation between Amri and two ISIS jihadists before informing German authorities. Amri also offered his services as a suicide attacker in well-known Islamist chat sites, Bild reported.
A spokesman for the German chief federal prosecutor denied the media reports, saying he would give no further details to avoid jeopardizing the police investigation and efforts to track down the suspect.
German media also reported — without naming their source — that Amri’s fingerprints have been found on the door of the truck. Broadcaster rbb said the suspect lost both his wallet and mobile phone while fleeing.
It also emerged Thursday that he might have been treated at a hospital before making his getaway, Britain’s Telegraph reported. Investigators have suspected he had been wounded because blood was found in the truck’s cab.
Police set their sights on Amri after finding an identity document under the driver’s seat of the truck. Authorities have stressed that he is just a suspect and was not necessarily the driver of the truck.
On Wednesday, Ralf Jaeger, interior minister of the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, said Amri arrived in Germany in July 2015 and his asylum application had been rejected in June 2016.
Klaus Bouillon, head of the group of interior ministers from Germany’s 16 federal states, said jihadists often deliberately left behind IDs at attack sites — as was the case in the Paris attacks — to cause alarm and steer public opinion against refugees, Reuters reported.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has faced calls to tighten asylum procedures since the attack.
It was revealed Wednesday that Amri had been under surveillance for several months as a possible terror threat until he slipped through authorities’ clutches.
Amri — who had been arrested earlier this year — was known to be a supporter of Ansar al-Sharia, the jihadist group behind the Sousse terror strike in Tunisia, and was a disciple of hate preacher Ahmad Abdelazziz A, known as Abu Walaa.
He used several identity documents under three nationalities and used six aliases. He also spent four years in an Italian prison before traveling to Germany in July 2015. Authorities could not deport him because he lacked valid ID papers showing his nationality, officials said.
Tunisia issued him a new passport but it only arrived on Wednesday, two days after the attack.
One of Amri’s brothers urged him to turn himself in.
“I ask him to turn himself in to the police. If it is proved that he is involved, we dissociate ourselves from it,” Abdelkader Amri told the Associated Press.
He said his brother may have been radicalized in prison in Italy, where he went after leaving Tunisia in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings.
Meanwhile, German media also reported several locations were searched overnight, including a house in Dortmund and a refugee home in Emmerich on the Dutch border.
Police in Denmark searched a Sweden-bound ferry in the port of Grenaa after getting tips that someone resembling Amri had been spotted. But police said they found nothing indicating his presence.
An Israeli woman, Dalia Elyakim, has been identified as one of the 12 killed, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon said.
The market where the attack took place has been quietly reopened — with concrete blocks in place at the roadside to provide extra security. Grieving Berliners and visitors have laid candles and flowers at the site in tribute.