Suspect in Berlin Truck Christmas Fair Deaths Killed in Milan

[Peter Lemkin]

It was just reported, with few details as of yet, that the man who was said to have been a rejected asylum seeker in Germany, and who's ID and fingerprints were said to have been found in the hijacked truck [along with the dead Polish driver] that killed 12 in Berlin and injured another 50, has been shot dead in Milan last night by police there. More to follow. He obviously has friends to be able to get from Berlin to Milan undetected with his face on posters everywhere. The current story is he was stopped by a police patrol in Milan at 3am and he fired at the police when asked for his ID. The police returned fire and killed him. One policeman is in hospital.

Anis Amri had fled Tunisia after the 2011 revolution, registering on the island of Lampedusa in February that year. According to Italian media, he started to show signs of aggressive behaviour while attending a centre for minors in Catania, reportedly having tried to set his school on fire. In October 2011, Amri was charged for robbery, arson and personal threats and sentenced to four years in jail. He reportedly spent time in prisons in Catania and then Palermo.

[meanwhile a Libyan airliner is being hijacked with about 100 aboard and is on the runway in Malta with negotiations ongoing....]

[Peter Lemkin]

BERLIN TRUCK TERROR SUSPECT AND THE CURIOUS MATTER OF ID PAPERS LEFT BEHIND

Not the First Time a Terror Suspect Apparently Left a Paper Trail -- or Was Previously Known

Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from DutchGamingCommunity DGC / YouTube, Bundesrepublik Deutschland / Wikimedia and Screenshot
Today, WhoWhatWhy has seen heavy traffic coming from Google searches that point to a story we ran almost two years ago. Why the sudden interest? It took us only a moment to discover the connection: We had written about the odd phenomenon of terrorists repeatedly leaving ID papers behind at the scene. And now, with the Berlin truck attack, we see yet another such example.
We also see that, in a pattern we have previously reported on with other terror incidents, the suspect was already known to authorities had even been in custody, but was released.
From CNN:
The Berlin truck attack suspect had been arrested in August with forged documents on his way to Italy but was released by a judge, a German security official tells CNN.
The suspect's identity papers were found inside the truck used in Monday's attack on a Christmas market, which left 12 people dead, German security officials said.
The suspect was known to German security services as someone in contact with radical Islamist groups, and had been assessed as posing a risk, Interior Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia Ralf Jaeger told reporters.
The suspect was believed to have entered Germany in July 2015, Jaeger said. His asylum request was refused in June, and Tunisian authorities were informed when the deportation process started.
What does it all mean? That's for you to decide. You can start by reading the original article, below.

Original story:

One intriguingif barely discussedaspect of the Paris massacre was the quick progress authorities made in their investigation.
According to CNN, this was thanks to a staggering errorby one of the two now-dead alleged perpetrators. The man, Said Kouachi, reportedly left his identification card in the abandoned getaway vehicle. "It was their only mistake," Dominique Rizet, police and justice consultant for CNN-affiliate BFMTV, opined.
Said Kouachi's ID card. Allegedly found in the getaway car.

Nonetheless, it was a most curious mistake.
After all, this is the same man who went to such trouble to seemingly hide his identity by wearing a mask.
***
Intriguingly, such apparent gaffes have marked other watershed violence. Consider these examples, and draw your own conclusion:
The Bundle of James Earl Ray: The accused killer of Martin Luther King escaped from a prison shortly before the attack, and left several items on the sidewalk near the assassination sitein a bundle that included his rifle, binoculars, clothing, his prison radio, and a newspaper clipping revealing where King would be staying.
Bundle of evidence dropped by James Earl Ray.

The Wallet of Lee Harvey Oswald: The alleged assassin of John F. Kennedy and killer of Officer J.D.Tippit purportedly dropped his wallet, which was found at the scene of Tippit's murder. To some, this appeared a little too neat. In any case, original law enforcement reports with this scenario were almost immediately replaced by another version: that the police took the wallet from him after he was arrested. (See "Assignment: Oswald" by former FBI agent James P. Hosty.)
Oswald's military ID, said to have been stained by FBI fingerprinting fluid.

Contents of Oswald's wallet.

The Visa of Satam al-Suqami: This identify document of one of the alleged 9/11 hijackers somehow survived unscathed a few blocks from the twin towers, though the plane itself was virtually obliterated.
Visa belonging to Satam al-Suqami

The Passports belonging to Ziad Jarrah and Saeed al-Ghamdi: The passports of two alleged hijackers of United Airlines Flight 93 supposedly survived the fiery crash in Pennsylvania that left the aircraft itself charred and widely scatteredwith one passport entirely intact.
Remains of Ziad Jarrah's visa.

Passport of Saeed al-Ghamdi

[Magda Hassan]

Not a surprise really. Same MO for many other events.

Berlin terror attack suspect was well-known to German intelligence agencies

By Johannes Stern
30 December 2016

One and a half weeks after the devastating attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, more information has emerged regarding the close links between German security authorities and the alleged perpetrator. Press reports allege that Anis Amri, who was shot while on the run in Italy, carried out the attack literally under the noses of the secret services. He was intensively monitored and officially classified as unusually dangerous just a few days before he drove a truck into a market on December 19.
According to the latest report by Hans Leyendecker and Georg Mascolo in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, on 14 December, five days before the attack, security authorities issued "the latest version of a personal profile containing everything they knew about Amri." The document describes "a man whose résumé is very similar to that of former assassins in the service of the terrorist group Islamic State," according to the two investigatory journalists, who have close links to sources in secret service circles.
According to Leyendecker and Mascolo, the secret services knew virtually all there was to know. The profile describes "the career of a petty criminal who was already in prison in Italy as a youth, and committed a theft in a German asylum shelter. It contains language skills: German, Arabic, Italian, Spanish and French…. It contains the eight identities that Amri used. There are constantly changing domiciles and places of residence. There are several pictures of him."
The journalists note that Amri may have shared many of these factors with other potential offenders under the surveillance of the intelligence services, but in his case, "the evidence is even more concrete." For instance, the state police agency in Duisburg described Amri as "a Salafist and radical fundamentalist." The police department in Dortmund assessed him to be a sympathizer of the Islamic State.
The authorities were also aware that "Amri has searched the Internet for instructions on the construction of pipe bombs [and] had shown interest in the chemical processes that can be used to produce explosives." There was allegedly at least one Chat in February this year in which Amri "presumably offered himself as a suicide bomber…most likely in conversation with an Islamic State member."
Amri was not only on the radar of the local security authorities in Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia. He was also repeatedly "on the watch list of the Joint federal and state Counter-Terrorism Center (GTAZ) in Berlin." Leyendecker and Mascolo report that the "profile of 14 December" was drawn up by the GTAZ. The report notes that Amri showed "experience with police" and a level of "conspiratorial behavior, which is unusual even among Islamists."
Now the security authorities have begun a debate about "what went wrong" in the run-up to the attack. In essence, there are two interpretations. According to one reading, the attack in Berlin "simply could not have been prevented," since there are "too many radical Islamists in Germany." According to the second reading, as Leyendecker and Mascolo put it, "there was a clear mishap in the Amri case. A perpetrator, who had been talking about attacks for ten months, should not have gone dark."
Both "readings," repeated endlessly by political circles and the media, are aimed at obscuring the obvious and decisive question: how could someone "go dark" under the noses of the authorities, which were monitoring him so closely, and who was active in a milieu teeming with undercover agents with whom Amri maintained direct contact?
All of the facts known about Amri and the manner in which the attack is being politically exploited indicate that there are forces in sections of the security apparatus that were more closely informed of the attack plans, allowed the attack to go ahead or even provided indirect support for it in order to destabilize the Merkel government and effect a political lurch to the right in Germany.
Since the attack, right-wingers in the media and political establishment have been drumming ceaselessly for an expansion of police-state measures and have been denouncing the refugee policy of Angela Merkel. Despite the fact that the chancellor adopted right-wing anti-refugee measures at the last CDU party congress, she is under relentless attack, especially from one of her coalition partners, the Christian Social Union.
A few days before the traditional CSU meeting at the beginning of January, the Bavarian Minister of Finance, Markus Söder, declared the "uncontrolled opening of the borders" to be a serious mistake. Now "Germans [...] anticipate that their state is defenseless. Terrorists and criminals must know that they cannot expect the good life with us, they must be made aware that it does not pay to attack Germany."
Söder demanded mass deportations next year. "We will have several hundred thousand people with a rejected asylum application in 2017 - so we need a deportation plan for the coming year to ensure that a large percentage of them can be returned," he said. "This must be done quickly and consistently."
A large share of political responsibility for the aggressive stance of the right wing rests with the SPD, the Left Party and the Greens. Their response to the rise of the far-right AfD and the right-wing elements in the CDU and CSU is to adopt the right-wing parties' policies and wage their own campaign for police-state measures and tougher action against refugees.
On Tuesday, the chairman of the SPD in Schleswig-Holstein, Ralf Stegner, who is also deputy chairman of the German Bundestag, called for so-called "potential offenders" to be permanently detained in deportation prisons. "If their applications for asylum have already been rejected, they must be imprisoned." In an interview with Die Welt, he attacked CDU Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière from the right, declaring that "the SPD provides many more police in federal and state governments and better equipment. Precisely in these areas the Interior Minister has put on the brakes."
The same tone is to be heard from the Left Party and Greens. Green Party deputy faction leader Konstantin von Notz declared, "The CSU is trying once again to pull the wool over our eyes: for more than ten years it has been part of the federal government, but acts as if it has been in the opposition for years and therefore not responsible for internal security." What is necessary is "more video surveillance for sensitive points."
The chairman of the Left Party, Dietmar Bartsch, is campaigning for a strengthening of the security forces and police. He told the newspaper Deutschlandfunk, "We need police, of course," adding, "this is not a new demand by the left for more policemen and good equipment, we have been demanding this for many years."
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/12...l-d30.html

[Magda Hassan]

Watching him so closely they even drove him when he went to go live in Berlin......

German intelligence agent drove alleged perpetrator in Christmas market attack to Berlin

By Peter Schwarz
28 December 2016

One week after the attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, there is a growing chorus of demands for a massive strengthening of the state apparatus, the elimination of basic democratic rights, and the erection of new barriers against refugees.
At its upcoming congress at the start of January, the Bavarian-based Christian Social Union (CSU), part of the coalition government headed by its sister party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), plans to call for more personnel and better equipment for the security services, additional powers for law enforcement, more monitoring of emails and communications services such as Whatsapp and Skype, and increased data exchanges between the European Union countries.
This is despite the fact that the Berlin attack cannot be attributed to a lack of surveillance or police powers granted to the security and judicial authorities. On the contrary, the alleged perpetrator, Anis Amri, prepared his action literally under the eyes of the authorities. It has now emerged that the 24-year-old Tunisian was driven to Berlin by an undercover informant of the Intelligence Service ("Verfassungsschutz"), which closely monitored Amri for months before he drove a large truck into a crowd on December 19.
Amri had been imprisoned in Italy for four years for criminal offenses and was reportedly radicalized while in jail. In 2015, he was released and went to Germany, where he applied unsuccessfully for asylum. According to an investigation by the German television program "Report Munich," he joined an Islamic network in which at least two spies for the German intelligence service were active.
On Friday evening, the ARD television program "Focus" ("Brennpunkt") cited a file according to which an "informant" ("VP") for the North Rhine-Westphalian state criminal office had already made contact with Amri at the end of 2015. "In the ensuing days, Amri stated that he wanted to carry out attacks in Germany using weapons of war (AK 47s, explosives)," the notation reads.
Between February and March of 2016, Amri was driven from Dortmund to Berlin by a "secret informant for the Intelligence Service" to whom he related his plans. The note in the file adds: "He was driven by VP and stated that his mission was to kill on behalf of Allah."
According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, at about the same time, the state criminal agency of North Rhine-Westphalia sent a report on the Islamic network in which Amri was active to the prosecutor's office in Karlsruhe. The top German criminal prosecutor commenced investigations into Amri on suspicion of support for and membership in a terrorist group. In November, he ordered the arrest of the head of the group, Abu Walaa, as well as other hard-core members.
Amri, however, remained free. Apparently, shortly after Amri had moved to Berlin with the help of agents of the state, the prosecutor's office handed over his case to the Berlin judiciary and encouraged it to investigate him on suspicion of preparing a major state-threatening act of violencea lesser form of terrorism. The Berlin public prosecutor's office then began its own investigation on the suspicion that Amri was merely planning a burglary to obtain money for the purpose of buying weapons.
Amri was subsequently supervised and monitored by the Berlin security authorities until September. Then the surveillance was reportedly stopped, supposedly because there was no evidence pointing to an imminent offence. The authorities in Berlin refrained from arresting him, although they had ample legal authority given the fact that Amri was an asylum-seeker whose application had been rejected and who was suspected of terrorism.
It is totally beyond belief that the failure to arrest Amri was an "accident," or was due to a lack of legal authority to take him into custody. Even Heribert Prantl, a lawyer who heads the internal affairs department of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, presumed on Friday that Amri was intentionally left alone.
He wrote: "Did the authorities accept the risks associated with Amri because they hoped that their surveillance would provide information? And did the supervising authority say nothing to other authorities because it wanted to keep the knowledge to itself?"
In fact, there are ample grounds to believe that sections of the state apparatus deliberately accepted the risk of such an attack in order to promote their own right-wing agenda. Fierce clashes have taken place in German ruling circles over refugee and security policy. Many regard Chancellor Angela Merkel as too soft to lead the government in times of major international and national tensions and mounting social conflicts. Under these circumstances, the attack is being used to intimidate the population and bring about a political change of course, possibly including a change of government.
The massive and unexplained evidence of state foreknowledge and even protection of the alleged perpetrator of the December 19 Berlin attack conforms to a by-now familiar pattern in regard to major terror attacks internationally. Such was the case in the November, 2015 attacks in Paris, the Boston Marathon bombings in April of 2013, and the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington DC.
In each case, the Islamist forces involved in the attacks were linked either to despotic regimes allied to Washington, such as Saudi Arabia, to militias being used as proxy forces for US imperialism and its European allies in the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa, or, in the case of the Boston Marathon attack, to CIA-backed Islamist separatists operating within the Russian Federation.
In all of these cases, the perpetrators had long been in the sights of the security forces, which refrained from intervening. In every case, the attacks provided the pretext for a massive buildup of the state apparatus. In France, the Socialist Party government of François Hollande seized on the Paris attacks to impose an indefinite state of emergency, which continues to this day. The Boston attacks were used to impose a martial-law-like lockdown and police-military occupation of a major American city. The September 11 attacks served as justification for the so-called "war on terror," involving a series of devastating wars in the Middle East and the erection of a surveillance and police state apparatus in the US.
The Berlin attack is now being exploited for similar purposes. Although there is no connection with the refugees who came to Germany last year to escape the imperialist wars in Syria and other countries, and although the German security authorities knew of Amri's intentions, there is an unceasing drumbeat for a strict policing of borders and the construction of a totalitarian surveillance state.
On Tuesday, Spiegel Online predicted that the conflict "will be even sharper, even more polarizing, even dirtier leading up to the Bundestag (parliamentary) elections in September." It noted that interior policy experts of all parties are discussing "a more consistent deportation policy, transit centres, video surveillance, and electronic foot-cuffs for Islamic threats." It stated further that Chancellor Merkel, who has declared she is prepared to stand for election to a fourth term, does not fundamentally oppose these debates, but now "knows she has to deliver."
Spiegel Online went on to declare that the "humanitarian imperative" was for yesterday. In 2017, Merkel would no longer be the "refugee chancellor," but rather the security chancellor. She had to embody the "strong state" that she has herself invoked in order to secure support within "her own ranks."
Similar reactions are being expressed internationally. In France, both the conservative Republicans (LR) and the far-right National Front are calling for the strengthening of borders. The Republicans spokesman Guillaume Larrivé declared: "Merkel's decision to open up borders has weakened the security of Europe, the whole continent. We need a different immigration policy, another security policyboth in Paris and Berlin."
The British Spectator complained that while the issue at hand was the need to abolish the right to asylum, Germany was still "a prisoner of its past, scarred by the knowledge that the land of Goethe and Beethoven murdered six million Jews."
The Week described Merkel's refugee policy as "a disaster." It wrote: "She said that welcoming this enormous wave of refugees was the only way to be true to European values.' But the current wave of terrorism and the enormous fear of crime and disorder in European cities is proving mortally dangerous not just to her own party, but to the European Union itself."

Most of the info comes from German media Die Speigel and ARD tv but this is the link I got this from:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/12...l-d28.html

[David Guyatt]

Watching him so closely they even drove him when he went to go live in Berlin......

You really couldn't make this up for a novel could you --- no one would believe it.