There are a lot of questions that are going to be need to be answered if the Berlin terrorist turns out to be the suspect they’re searching for, Anis Amri.
According to the Wall Street Journal, he had been imprisoned for lighting a refugee camp on fire:
Half a year later, Italy turned down Anis Amri’s application for a residency permit, according to Italian officials, and he and two other Tunisians were arrested and sentenced to four years in prison for setting fire to the center housing them. He served much of his four-year prison sentence at the Ucciardone prison in the Sicilian capital, Palermo, infamous for having housed the worst of the mafia
They let him go early, and ordered him to go back to Tunisia – he just ignored the order:
Italian authorities released Mr. Amri a few months early, in May 2015, and ordered him to leave the country. While in prison he received 12 warnings for violent behavior, a spokeswoman for the Italian Justice Ministry said.
Rather than go back to Tunisia as Italy requested, Mr. Amri traveled to Switzerland and after a week to Germany, according to his family. He told his brother Walid that he had found intermittent employment in agriculture and at a garage.
He then began self-radicalizing according to authorities, and got in touch with ISIS sympathizers:
They say he made contact with a radical Iraqi preacher known as Abu Walaa, whom authorities took into custody last month for recruiting fighters for Islamic State. Mr. Amri was also in touch with at least two of the preacher’s associates, who were also taken into custody in November, according to a German security official briefed on the investigation.
But he was STILL running around Europe!!
They actually began a terror probe, but dropped him:
After bouncing around Germany, Mr. Amri moved to Berlin in February, authorities say. Berlin prosecutors, acting on a tip from federal investigators, launched a probe against him in March because they thought he might be planning an attack. But months of surveillance yielded no evidence that could stand up in court, prosecutors said this week.
They rejected his asylum application, ordered him deported, detained him, and then let him go, and dropped the surveillance. It’s almost as if they were begging him to attack.
I don’t necessarily blame the authorities here. Maybe there really wasn’t anything there to investigate at the time. But if you don’t have enough resources to surveil a guy who eventually killed your citizens after all these warning signs, maybe you have too man refugees?
Just a thought.
They discuss the missed flags in the latter part of this report: