Update: German police on Tuesday released the sole suspect they had in custody in connection with Monday’s deadly truck attack at a Berlin market. BBC News reports that police concluded that they do not have sufficient evidence to purse charges against the man, who was previously described as a 23-year-old asylum-seeker from Pakistan who came to Berlin this past February.
Earlier in the day, officials conceded that they were no longer positive that the man, who was arrested about a mile-and-a-half from the scene, was the driver of the truck, as was originally believed. “We have to entertain the theory that the detainee might possibly not have been the perpetrator,” federal prosecutor Peter Frank told reporters at the time.
Original post, 9:33 a.m.: at German officials on Tuesday suggested that the truck attack that killed 12 people and injured another 48 the evening before is looking increasingly like a terrorist attack the more they learn. At the same time, however, officials also suggested that they are not positive the suspect they took into custody near the scene was the driver of the truck as they had once thought.
“We must assume at the current time that it was a terrorist attack,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said during comments to the press, according to the New York Times. “I know that it would be particularly difficult for all of us to bear if it is confirmed that this deed was carried out by a person who sought protection and asylum in Germany.” That remark was in reference to the suspect that police arrested near the scene, said to be an a 23-year-old asylum-seeker from Pakistan who had arrived in Berlin in February of this year.
Police say the driver of the truck eventually fled on foot and that they later arrested their suspect about a mile-and-a-half from the crash site. On Tuesday, however, comments by Berlin’s chief of police, Klaus Kandt, suggested authorities have at least some doubt that their suspect was the driver. “We haven’t been able to confirm it yet,” he told reporters at one point, and “it is actually not clear” he was the driver at another, according to reports.
According to German media, the man in question had already been on the police’s radar for minor crimes. A spokesman for Berlin’s office for refugee affairs told the Associated Press that police conducted a large-scale search overnight at a large shelter for asylum-seekers at Berlin’s now-defunct Tempelhof airport, but made no arrests.
Monday’s incident occurred at around 8 p.m. local time on Monday. A tractor-trailor truck jumped a sidewalk in Berlin and plowed into the popular market near the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. According to witnesses, the truck did not slow down as it moved through the crowd. Of the four-dozen wounded, 18 are said to have been injured critically. Among the dead, authorities say, was a Polish man who was found with a gunshot wound in the passenger seat of the truck. Officials have suggested they consider that man a victim, not a perpetrator of the attack, and the Polish owner of the truck has said he believes it may have been hijacked, the AP reports.
If this was indeed a terrorist act, it mirrors a similar one that occurred in the French city of Nice in July, when a Tunisian man, who appeared to sympathize with ISIS, drove a cargo truck into a crowd of people celebrating Bastille Day, leaving 86 dead and nearly 500 injured. As my colleague Joshua Keating pointed out back in 2014, driving an automobile into a crowded public place has been endorsed by Inspire, the English-language online magazine published by al-Qaida, and is considered a low-cost method of carrying out attacks for would-be terrorists who do not have access to explosives.
