Berlin Christmas Market Attack Suspect Killed in Italy Shootout
(JTA) – Italian police killed the main suspect in a terrorist attack that killed 12 people in Berlin, including an Israeli tourist.
Police stopped the suspect, 24-year-old Anis Amri of Tunisia, for a random inspection in a Milan suburb in the early hours of Friday morning, Reuters reported. He took out a pistol and opened fire, hitting one of the police officers in the shoulder. The officer is now recovering.
Other officers returned fire, killing Amri, who German authorities believe plowed a stolen truck on Monday through a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12, including the Israeli tourist Dalia Elyakim, who was buried Friday in Israel.
Rami Elyakim, her husband, was among 50 wounded in the attack, which the Islamic State in a statement claimed was the work of one of its “soldiers.”
Rami Elyakim did not attend his wife’s funeral in Herzliyah north of Tel Aviv as he is undergoing treatment in Germany for serious, though not life-threatening, injuries, Army Radio reported.
Amri was also was caught on camera by police on a regular stake-out at a mosque in Berlin’s Moabit district early on Tuesday a few hours after the attack, Germany’s RBB public broadcaster reported.
Amri was not a suspect at that time, and on Thursday morning, when police raided the mosque, they could not find him, RBB said.
German investigators had said they believed Amri was still lying low in Berlin because he is probably wounded and would not want to attract attention, Der Tagesspiegel, reported citing security sources.
In the early hours of Friday morning, special forces arrested two men suspected of planning an attack on a shopping mall in the city of OberhausenIn in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, police said in a statement.
The men – two brothers from Kosovo, aged 28 and 31 – were arrested in the city of Duisburg on information from security sources, they said.
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