On May 29th, 2017, German news source Die Welt reported that German authorities raided the homes of five police officers amid a probe into evidence which suggests that law enforcement engaged in a cover up of Berlin terrorist Anis Amri’s history of criminal activity which would have warranted his arrest. Politico reported that police were seeking cell phones to verify whether the officials were communicating about the alleged cover-up.
Reports emerged earlier this month that Anis Amri, who carried out the deadly attack in Berlin last December, was a known drug dealer and police allegedly had enough evidence to jail him up to six months before the attack in which 12 people died. He had been under surveillance since March 2016 in Berlin, but security services said they dropped their watch in September, having only observed his activities as a drug dealer.
Berlin interior minister Andreas Geisel said police knew Amri was not just a small-time drug dealer as first claimed but had engaged in commercial-scale, organised drug trafficking, for which he said police could have obtained an arrest warrant. Geisel further alleged that at least one policeman involved had later forged a document in the cover-up of the omission.
On January 2017, Disobedient Media reported that German officials ignored multiple tips in September and October 2016 from Moroccan intelligence, warning them that Anis Amri was known to have sworn allegiance to the Islamic State and was meeting regularly with known ISIS operatives. This series of failures to properly investigate Amri and prevent the Berlin truck attack came on the heels of November 2016 reports that an intelligence officer working for Germany’s internal intelligence agency, the Bundesverfassungsschutz (BfV) was arrested for taking part in a plot to bomb the BfV’s headquarters in Cologne, Germany. This news was given little to no attention by U.S. media.
German news source Der Spiegel reported that the 51 year-old intelligence officer made a “partial confession” to his role in plotting the attack following his arrest.
These failures to properly respond to warnings about the Berlin truck attack and the infiltration of intelligence organizations by ISIS operatives seem to indicate either a troubling level of incompetence or complicity within German police bodies as well as intelligence and anti-terror bureaus.
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