A horrific terrorist attack using a tractor-trailer to mow down a crowd at a Christmas market in central Berlin set off painful mourning across Germany on Tuesday as the authorities stumbled through the initial phases of the investigation into who was behind the nation’s bloodiest assault in decades.
Early in the day the authorities announced that they had the arrested a 23-year-old Pakistani asylum seeker who arrived in Germany last December as a suspect. As the day progressed they expressed uncertainty that he was indeed the driver of the truck.
By the evening the federal prosecutor said the suspect, who denied he had any connection to the attack, was released because there was no proof linking him to the crime. An examination of both the suspect and the cab of the truck turned up no proof that he had been in it, the prosecutor said.
That meant the culprit was still on the run, and though there was no claim of responsibility for the attack, far-right politicians wasted no time in pinning responsibility for the deaths on Chancellor Angela Merkel.
A senior security source told Bild tonight they have been unable to ‘track’ the wanted man – and also do not know if he is a lone wolf or part of a larger terror cell.
Berlin prosecutor Holger Münch has warned of a ‘serious threat’ of another ‘significant’ terror attack and Berliners were urged to stay indoors.
The city’s police chief Klaus Kandt said the ‘dangerous criminal’ behind a deadly truck rampage may still be on the run while Interior minister for a German state, Klaus Bouillon, said that Germany is ‘in a state of war’ after the massacre on Breitscheidplatz Square last night – the seventh in the country this year.
Detectives who interrogated Naved B, said he had no blood on his clothes, no injuries and denied hijacking a 25-tonne lorry and using it to murder 12 people and injure 48 more last night.
A security services source, a senior police officer, told die Welt newspaper: ‘We have the wrong man. The true perpetrator is still armed, at large and can cause further damage.’
Not only did the attack usher in the shattering realization that Germany, too, was now among the front ranks of European countries, alongside France and Belgium, that have suffered large-scale attacks in recent years.