Berlin Christmas market attacker killed in shootout with cops
The Tunisian refugee suspected of slaughtering a dozen people in a truck attack in Berlin this week freely traveled 1,000 miles across Europe before he was stopped and killed in a Friday shootout with police.
Authorities finally caught up with Anis Amri, 24, at about 3 a.m. local time in front of the Sesto San Giovanni train station north of Milan — ending a Europe-wide manhunt, Italy’s interior minister said.
When asked for ID, Amri pulled a gun and shot one of the officers in the shoulder, shouting, “Police bastards.”
A second cop, trainee Luca Scata, returned fire, killing Europe’s most wanted man.
How Amri managed to slip out of Berlin and travel across the continent — at one point taking a high-speed train from France to Turin, Italy — raises questions about Europe’s open borders.
Perhaps more troubling is that Amri was under surveillance in Germany as a terror threat in the months before the Monday truck attack — but the country wasn’t able to deport him because he didn’t have valid identity papers.
“The Amri case raises a number of questions,” admitted German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “We will now press ahead and look into in how far state measures need to be changed.”
Amri left Tunisia in 2011 in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings and reached the Italian island of Lampedusa by boat.
There, he lied to authorities about being a minor and was transferred to Catania, Sicily, where he enrolled in school.
A few months later, he was arrested for setting the school on fire, a senior police source said.
He was repeatedly transferred among Sicilian prisons for bad conduct, with prison records saying he bullied inmates and tried to spark insurrections.
Amri served 3½ years for setting a fire at a refugee center and making threats, among other crimes. All the while, he was being radicalized by extremist groups, his father has said.
Italy tried to deport Amri to Tunisia, but authorities there refused to take him back because they couldn’t verify he was Tunisian. He was merely ordered to leave Italy in 2014, officials said.
The next year, Amri tried his luck in Germany, where authorities denied his application for asylum in June 2016.
But yet again, he wasn’t deported because he lacked ID papers, officials said.
German authorities had deemed Amri a potential threat long before the Berlin attack and even kept him under surveillance for six months this year.
He was suspected of buying automatic weapons for a terror plot. Authorities had also tied him to an ISIS recruiter in Germany, The Washington Post reported.
But he dropped off their radar in November — until his identity papers were found in the truck used in the Berlin bloodbath.
Shortly after he was killed, a video was released showing Amri pledging allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, investigators said.