The Tunisian man suspected of driving a truck into a Berlin Christmas market was killed early Friday morning by the police during a shootout that took place in a suburb of Milan. “The man killed was without a shadow of doubt Anis Amri,” Italian Interior Minister Marco Minniti said of the 24-year-old who is the main suspect in the Monday attack that killed 12 people. Two police officers stopped Amri at around 3 a.m. but he pulled out a gun as soon as they asked him for identification. A shootout ensued and an officer who had only been on the job nine months killed the most wanted man in Europe. The other officer was shot and was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Although it seems the police officers came across Amri as part of a routine stop, police apparently had a tip that the suspect may be in Milan so they increased the number of officers on patrol in the area to look for him. Still, the inevitable question that arises from Amri’s death is how the target of such an intense manhunt was able to travel 644 miles across the continent. Law enforcement officers found a train ticket on Amri that suggested he took a high speed train from France to the northern Italian city of Turin before getting on a regional train to the Milan area.
Beyond how he was able to travel while the continent’s law enforcement was searching for him, Amri’s case also provides lots of red flags about how a man officials had already tried to deport several times was walking around freely. Italy had jailed Amri in 2011 and that’s where he appears to have become radicalized. Italy tried to deport him but when Tunisia refused to recognize him as a citizen, Italy released him. Eventually Germany also tried to deport him after he blatantly lied on an asylum application, but also failed. The Washington Post notes that Amri’s case exposes “two critical realities of modern terrorism” and the challenges for law enforcement:
The cumbersome, sometimes flawed system of deportation and asylum — mixed with open borders — has made it exceedingly easy for radicalized Islamists to operate on the continent.
Yet Amri is also the latest suspect to have emerged from a disconcerting counterterrorism gap in both Europe and the United States.
In case after case — including that of the German Christmas market attack — authorities have come forward after the fact to say that they had enough cause to place the suspect under surveillance well before the violence. But never enough to move in for an arrest.
This has been true of the majority of lone-wolf terrorism plots over the past several years.
