Berlin Truck Attacker Had Been Flagged as a High-Level Drug Dealer
By ALISON SMALEMAY 18, 2017
BERLIN — Anis Amri, the Tunisian man who killed 12 people in an attack on a Christmas market in Berlin in December, had been flagged
weeks earlier as a high-level drug dealer, according to a newly discovered police document that has caused an uproar in Germany.
Berlin’s interior minister, Andreas Geisel, who announced the discovery of the document on Wednesday, told city lawmakers on Thursday
that a thorough investigation "is what we owe the victims, their families and the survivors." The document, dated Nov. 1, was uncovered by Bruno Jost, a former federal prosecutor whom the city hired to review the case.
At a news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Geisel raised the possibility
that the police were trying to cover up their failure to act on the Nov. 1 document by backdating the Jan. 17 document so that it appeared that the police had conflicting intelligence.
However, Benjamin Jendro, a spokesman for the Berlin police union, told the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel
that even if the Nov. 1 warning had been acted on, "There is no guarantee that he would have been arrested." Often, in drug trafficking investigations, the priority is finding the people pulling the strings, not the dealers themselves, Mr. Jendro said.
Mr. Geisel, who is from the center-left Social Democrats, is seen by some critics as trying to score points by appearing tough on crime —
and by potentially embarrassing the Christian Democrats, who shared power with the Social Democrats in the previous government.