Algiers: German police are staging a manhunt for a "violent" and "armed" Tunisian man after the deadly assault on a Berlin Christmas market on Monday which left 12 dead and dozens wounded.
The suspect left Tunisia seven years ago and spent time in prison in Italy, his father and security sources told Tunisia's Radio Mosaique on Wednesday.
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Germany cleans up as manhunt begins
Berlin cleans up after a truck driver ploughed through a Berlin market killing 12, and authorities consider the at-large suspect to be armed and dangerous.
The radio reported on its website that security sources had named the suspect as Anis Amri from Oueslatia in rural central Tunisia. He served four years in jail in Italy on accusations of burning a school, it said.
He was in contact with Islamist militants in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and was known to German security agencies, the state's Interior Minister said on Wednesday.
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"Security agencies exchanged their findings and information about this person with the Joint Counter-Terrorism Centre in November 2016," NRW Interior Minister Ralf Jaeger told a news conference.
He said the suspect had applied for asylum in Germany and his application was rejected in July. Attempts to deport the man to Tunisia failed as he did not have identification papers, and the Tunisian authorities disputed whether he was their national.
Germany has offered a reward of up to €100,000 ($144,000) for information leading to his arrest.
"Anis AMRI is 178 cm tall and weighs about 75 kg, has black hair and brown eyes," the office said in the statement. "Beware: He could be violent and armed."
He had moved from NRW to Berlin in February 2016 and sought to make the German capital his new home, Jaeger said, adding that the Tunisian man sought by police had used different names. His father told the radio station that his son left for Germany a year ago.
A senior law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the manhunt followed the discovery "leave to remain" papers of the man - an asylum seeker - in the cabin of the truck used to ram the market.
The Federal Prosecutor's Office (GBA) said in a statement that a search for Amri was under way, with support from police forces in all of Germany's 16 federal states.
On Wednesday police began searching a shelter for migrants in western Germany where the suspect is believed to have lived, a newspaper said.
Rheinische Post said the shelter is in the town of Emmerich, which lies about 140 kilometres north of the city of Cologne, near the border with the Netherlands.
Germany's Bild newspaper ran a photo of the suspect, who had several aliases and said he was born in the southern Tunisian desert town of Tataouine in 1992. Bild reported that the suspect was known by the police for alleged physical assault, but was never charged, because he had disappeared.
Witnesses described one man fleeing the scene on Monday after he slammed a truck packed with a cargo of steel into revellers at a traditional Christmas market. Although one suspect - a Pakistani asylum seeker - was arrested on Monday night, authorities later released him due to lack of evidence.
They are now considering the Tunisian man as the prime suspect.
"We have a strong lead at the moment and our officers are out on the street," the senior official told The Washington Post.
According to the daily Suddeutsche Zeitung, the suspect arrived in Italy in 2012, but moved on to Germany in July 2015. In April 2016, he applied for asylum, but disappeared earlier this month. The paper said he had been using eight names.
The paper, along with other German media outlets, added that the man had contacts with a network run by a radical Islamist known as Abu Walaa, who was arrested last month for allegedly recruiting Islamic State fighters. According to the report, police were searching all area hospitals in their quest for the suspect.
The new information emerged as German investigators raced for clues in the hunt for suspects in the deadly assault, poring over forensic evidence and GPS data as they sought to retrace the steps of the attacker. They were re-questioning witnesses and analysing DNA traces found in the truck, as well as on the body of a dead Polish man in the passenger seat.
The Pole worked for a trucking company and was delivering a payload of steel to Berlin. Investigators are going on the assumption that he was taken hostage by the assailant - and may even have died a hero. Jorg Radek deputy chairman of the German Trade Union of the Police, said evidence suggested that "a fight took place in the driver's cabin". As it careened toward the crowded market, the truck was not driving straight, but "in a zig-zag line", he noted.
Bild also quoted an investigator as saying the Polish man - who was shot dead - had received multiple stab wounds in a manner that suggested he may have tried to grab the steering wheel to stop the assault as it happened.
Amid these latest revelations, the country has been convulsed in a national debate over who and what was to blame.
The Islamic State on Tuesday claimed responsibility for inspiring the unknown attacker - a claim as yet unproven - leading some politicians to quickly point the finger at Chancellor Angela Merkel's humanitarian move last year to open Germany's door to nearly a million migrants, most from the war-torn Middle East.
Yet others quickly pushed back, calling the accusations a politicising of tragedy that had no place in progressive Germany.
In a country where laws and traditions strongly emphasise personal privacy, the identities of the victims of the Berlin attack have barely begun to emerge.
One of the victims was a 65-year-old woman from Neuss, a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, according to news reports.
Fabrizia Di Lorenzo, an Italian transportation specialist who has been living in Germany for three years, has been missing since Monday, and her father, Gaetano Di Lorenzo, said he feared the worst.
"We are here with my wife, waiting for the DNA results," he said in an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. "We are waiting for confirmation, but I am not deluding myself."
The daughter's mobile phone and transit pass were found near the scene immediately after the attack, her relatives and friends said on social media on Tuesday.
In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the attack "may have claimed the life of an Israeli citizen".
He was referring to Dalia Elkayam, who has been missing since Monday and whose husband, Rami Elkayam, was seriously injured in the attack.
On Tuesday, Horst Seehofer, chairman of the Christian Social Union, sister party of Merkel's Christian Democrats said: "We owe it to the victims, those affected and the entire population to rethink and readjust our entire immigration and security policy."
On Wednesday, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann defended Seehofer from a barrage of critics claiming he and others were seizing on the attack to further their anti-migrant stance.
"This is no sweeping judgment of refugees," he said. "Compared to the high number of refugees, these are only very few, but the risks are obvious and we must not close our eyes."
A number of newspaper editorials and other politicians on Wednesday criticised Herrmann's remarks and similar statements as premature and lacking in respect for the victims.
Commentator Jurgen Kaube in the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said such comments risked over-generalising Muslim migrants and were implicitly turning the hateful views of the Islamic State into "the true representative of the Muslim world".
"It is appalling if there are now calls to reconsider the refugee policy as a whole," the paper Die Tageszeitung wrote in an editorial.
"Why for heaven's sake?... What happened in Berlin was long feared. An act of brutal violence. The only effective defence: to keep calm."
In a new age of risk, increasingly, the debate has been morphing into a discussion on what kind of nation Germans want to live in - and how much risk it is willing to assume. Some authorities were arguing for the installation of more public surveillance cameras, as is common, for instance, in Britain, and with which investigators into Monday's assault may have had more to go on.
There were also growing calls for the deployment of more police on the streets with heavy weapons, including automatic ones - a frequent sight in France and Belgium, for instance, but far more unusual in pacifist Germany.
Klaus Bouillon, head of a conference of interior ministers from German states, declared on Tuesday that the country was now "in a state of war". He called for beefed up security at public events.
"We have to look into what technical possibilities there are to block streets ... There are big concrete blocks ... there are systems I have already requested," he said.
"We also will have to increasingly work with machine guns and long weapons."
At the normally quant and picturesque Christmas markets in at least two German cities - Mainz and Magdeburg - concrete barriers were quickly erected for added security. In Magdeburg, police officers armed with automatic weapons were guarding the entrance.
Yet others argued that living a free and open society was perhaps more important, and that Germans were willing to accept a certain measure of risk to preserve that openness.
"If we want to maintain the freedom of our society, we simply have to live with the risk contained in this decision," Die Tageszeitung added in its editorial.
Reuters, Washington Post, The New York Times