REUTERS - Italian police shot
dead the man believed to be responsible for this week's Berlin Christmas market
truck attack, killing him after he pulled a gun on them during
a routine check
in the early hours of Friday.
The suspect -
24-year-old Tunisian Anis Amri - traveled to Italy from France, triggering a
spate of criticism from euroskeptics over Europe's open-border Schengen pact.
A police chief said
his men had no idea they might be dealing with Amri when they approached him at
around 3 a.m. (2200 EDT) outside a station in Sesto San Giovanni, a suburb of
the northern city of Milan.
Amri is suspected of
driving a truck that smashed through a Berlin market on Monday killing 12
people, and security forces across Europe have been trying to track him down.
The truck mowed
through a crowd of people and bulldozed wooden huts selling Christmas gifts and
snacks beside a famous church in west Berlin.
Militant group Islamic
State acknowledged Amri's death and his suspected role in the German attack -
for which it has claimed responsibility - through its Amaq news agency.
"The executor
of the Berlin attacks carries out another attack on Italian police in Milan and
is killed in a shoot-out," it said.
Milan police chief
Antonio De Iesu told reporters that Amri had arrived in Milan's main railway
station from France at around 1 a.m. and had then traveled to Sesto San
Giovanni, where two young policemen approached him because he looked
suspicious.
"We had no
intelligence that he could be in Milan," De Iesu said. "They had no
perception that it could be him otherwise they would have been much more
cautious."
He failed to produce
any identification so the police requested he empty his pockets and his small
backpack. He pulled a loaded gun from his bag and shot at one of the men,
lightly wounding him in the shoulder.
Amri then hid behind
a nearby car but the other police officer managed to shoot him once or twice,
killing him on the spot. Amri was identified by his finger prints.
ITALIAN JAIL
De Iesu said that
besides the gun, Amri had been carrying a small pocket knife. He also had a few
hundred euros on him but no cell phone. Amri once spent four years in jail in
Italy and police were trying to work out if he knew someone in Sesto.
A judicial source
had earlier told Reuters that police had a tip off that Amri might be in the
Milan area and that additional patrols had been sent out to look for him. De
Iesu denied that, saying only that the authorities had recently ordered tighter
security and more identification checks across the country.
"The two
policemen simply decided to check up on a foreigner," De Iesu said.
Leading euroskeptics
were quick to blame the Schengen open pact for allowing the fugitive to travel
easily.
"This escapade
in at least two or three countries is symptomatic of the total security
catastrophe that is the Schengen agreement," said Marine Le Pen, who leads
France's far-right, anti-immigrant National Front party and is running for
president.
"I reiterate my
pledge to give back France full control of its sovereignty, its national
borders and to put an end to the consequences of the Schengen agreement,"
she said.
Amri had been caught
on camera by German police on a regular stake-out at a mosque in Berlin's
Moabit district early on Tuesday, Germany's rbb public broadcaster reported.
His movements thereafter are not clear.
He had originally
come to Europe in 2011, reaching the Italian island of Lampedusa by boat. He
told authorities he was a minor, though documents now indicate he was not, and
he was transferred to Catania, Sicily, where he was enrolled in school.
Just months later he
was arrested by police after he attempted to set fire to the school, a senior
police source said. He was later convicted of vandalism, threats, and theft.
He spent almost four
years in Italian prisons before being ordered out of the country after Tunisia
refused to accept him back because he did not have I.D. papers linking him to
the north African country.
He moved to Germany
and applied for asylum there, but this was rejected after he was identified by
security agencies as a potential threat. Once again he could not be deported
because of a lack of identification documentation.
A spokeswoman for
Angela Merkel said the German Chancellor will discuss the deportation of
rejected asylum applicants during a phone conversation with Tunisian President
Beji Caid Essebsi.
The Berlin attack
has put Europe on high alert over the Christmas period.
In the early hours
of Friday morning, German 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.
The men - two
brothers from Kosovo, aged 28 and 31 - were arrested in the city of Duisburg on
information from security sources, police said.
A police spokesman
said there was no connection between the Duisburg arrests and the Amri case.
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