Berlin Christmas market re-opens as hunt for attacker goes on
Posted December 22, 2016 7:15 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
BERLIN (NEWS 1130) – The Berlin Christmas market that was ripped apart by a deadly truck attack re-opened this morning in a signal of the German capital’s resilience, while police across Europe keep up the hunt for a Tunisian suspect whose fingerprints were reportedly on the truck.
Police placed concrete blocks at the roadside to provide extra security for the market outside the city’s landmark Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. In a solemn tribute to the 12 people killed and 48 injured in Monday evening’s mayhem, organizers decided to do without party music and bright lighting, and Berliners and visitors laid candles and flowers at the site.
German authorities issued a wanted notice for Anis Amri yesterday and offered a reward of up to $104,000 US for information leading to the 24-year-old’s arrest, warning that he could be “violent and armed.”
The Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and broadcasters NDR and WDR say Amri’s fingerprints were found on the driver’s door of the Polish-registered truck. The reports did not name sources and German prosecutors refused to comment on them.
One of Amri’s brothers still in Tunisia, meanwhile, urged him to stop being a fugitive. “I ask him to turn himself in to the police. If it is proved that he is involved, we dissociate ourselves from it,” brother Abdelkader Amri told The Associated Press.
He said Amri may have been radicalized in prison in Italy, where he went after leaving Tunisia in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings.
Several locations across Germany were searched overnight, including a house in the Dortmund and a refugee home in Emmerich on the Dutch border, German media reported.
The manhunt also prompted police in Denmark to search a Sweden-bound ferry in the port of Grenaa after receiving tips that someone resembling Amri had been spotted, but police said they found nothing.
German officials had deemed Amri, who arrived in the country last year, a potential threat long before the attack Monday and even kept him under covert surveillance for six months this year before halting the operation.
They had been trying to deport him after his asylum application was rejected in July but were unable to do so because he lacked valid identity papers and Tunisia initially denied that he was a citizen.
