Suspect In Berlin Bombing Is Shot Down By Police

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

Tunisian Anis Amri, suspected of committing the attack on a Berlin Christmas market, died on Friday in a shootout with Italian police outside Milan.

According to the transalpine authorities, a patrol had stopped the 24-year-old man in the Sesto San Giovanni neighborhood and asked for his documentation when he took out a pistol from his backpack and shouted "bastard policemen."

He then opened fire on the officers, who responded with their regulatory weapons from inside their patrol car, shooting down Amri.

In the shooting, which happened around 3 am local time, one of the policemen, Cristian Morio, was injured, who is recovering in hospital satisfactorily, according to the Italian press.

According to the Italian Interior Ministry, authorities were not alerted to the suspect's presence and the officers in question simply asked for the documentation as part of their routine work.

An ISIS-linked agency released a video shortly after the Tunisian's death declaring its allegiance to the leader of the Islamic extremist group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Amri was the most wanted man in Europe since he was identified as the alleged person responsible for ramming a Christmas market in Berlin last Monday with a high-tonnage truck, killing 12 people.

Until this apparently fortuitous encounter with the police in Milan, his whereabouts were apparently unknown. According to the Italian agency ANSA, he would have arrived by train to that city in northern Italy from the eastern French region of Savoy.

Another delicate point of the investigation is how Amri, who was considered one of the most dangerous Islamists in Germany by the German security forces, was able to carry out the attack without raising suspicions, reported CNN.