Berlin // Germany was searching on Saturday for possible accomplices of the Berlin truck attacker as Tunisia announced the arrest of three men linked to the extremist.
One of those detained was the nephew of Anis Amri, the Tunisian-born attacker who was shot dead by Italian police on Friday.
The three men, aged between 18 and 27, were arrested on Friday and were members of a "terrorist cell ... connected to the terrorist Anis Amri", Tunisia's interior ministry said.
"One of the members of the cell is the son of the sister of the terrorist and during the investigation he admitted that he was in contact with his uncle through Telegram," it said.
Amri allegedly urged his nephew to adopt extremist "takfiri" ideology "and asked him to pledge allegiance to Daesh", it said.
The ministry made no direct link between the trio and the attack on Monday, when Amri hijacked a lorry and used it to mow down shoppers at a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 people.
The 24-year-old then went on the run and was the focus of a frantic four-day manhunt, before being shot dead by police in Milan after opening fire when he was stopped during a routine security check.
The Berlin rampage was claimed by ISIL, which released a video on Friday in which Amri is shown pledging allegiance to the group's leader, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi.
Germany had long feared such an attack as security services warned of a growing extremist culture. Rarely a week has gone by in past years without the arrest of a radical preacher, an extremist backing ISIL or other such groups with money, arms or propaganda, or of a fighter returning from Syria or Iraq.
Germany's domestic security chief, Hans-Georg Maassen, has likened the rise in ISIL followers to a dangerous "youth subculture". While it has drawn some home-grown converts and many female recruits, the main target group has shared the "four Ms" profile - male, Muslim, with a migrant background and a history of personal misadventure, he said.
It is a profile that fit Amri - an illegal migrant, drug dealer and ex-convict. He was one of about 550 known extremists considered capable of violence by the German domestic security service, which estimates that the number of religious radicals in the country has risen from about 3,800 in 2011 to more than 9,000 this year.
German investigators are now racing to find out whether Amri had accomplices.
"It is very important for us to determine whether there was a network of accomplices ... in the preparation or the execution of the attack, or the flight of the suspect," federal prosecutor Peter Frank said.
German security services have faced strong criticism for not keeping better tabs on Amri before the attack, even though he was known to them and suspected of plotting an attack.
But interior minister Thomas de Maziere denied there had been a blanket security failure.
It "is impossible to monitor every person suspected of posing a threat around the clock", he told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
Amri's port of entry to Europe was Italy, arriving on a migrant boat in 2011. He then spent four years in prison there for starting a fire in a refugee centre, during which time he was apparently radicalised.
After serving his sentence he made his way to Germany last year, taking advantage of Europe's Schengen system of open borders - as he did on his return to Italy after last week's attack.
German security agencies began monitoring Amri in March, suspecting that he was planning break-ins to raise cash for automatic weapons to carry out an attack.
But the surveillance was stopped in September because Amri, who was supposed to have been deported months earlier, was seen primarily as a small-time drug dealer.
* Agence France-Presse
http://ift.tt/2irBsgY
3Novices Europe
No comments:
Post a Comment