2016 truck attack in Berlin, Germany
On 19 December 2016, a truck was deliberately driven into the Christmas market next to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at Breitscheidplatz in Berlin, leaving 12 people dead and 56 others injured. One of the victims was the truck's original driver, Łukasz Urban, who was found shot dead in the passenger seat. The truck was eventually stopped by its automatic brakes. The perpetrator was Anis Amri, an unsuccessful asylum seeker from Tunisia. Four days after the attack, he was killed in a shootout with police near Milan in Italy. An initial suspect was arrested and later released due to lack of evidence. Nearly five years after the attack, a man who was critically injured during the attack died from complications related to his wounds, becoming the 13th victim. As of December 2023, this attack remains the worst Islamist terrorist attack by number of casualties in German history.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant claimed responsibility for the attack and released a video of the perpetrator, Anis Amri, pledging allegiance to the terror group's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Background.
The Berlin attack took place during a time of heightened Islamist terrorist activity in Europe. Several terrorist attacks in 2016, in Germany and in neighboring countries, have been linked to ISIS; some of them were similar to the truck attack on the Christmas market in Berlin (e.g. the 2014 Nantes attack and the 2016 Nice truck attack, both in France).
Attack.
Truck hijacking.
The vehicle involved, a black Scania R 450 semi-trailer truck, bore Polish number plates and belonged to a Polish delivery company, "Usługi Transportowe (Transport Services) Ariel Żurawski", based in Sobiemyśl. The truck was on its return leg to Poland, having started its trip in Turin, Italy, and was transporting steel beams to a Berlin warehouse owned by ThyssenKrupp.
The head of the delivery company, Ariel Żurawski, reported that his cousin Łukasz Robert Urban ;ref name="DIE WELT 2016 / Drei Ansätze" ; ;/ref ; had been driving the truck to Berlin, but that he could not imagine him being responsible for the attack. Żurawski's company last contacted Urban between 15:00 and 16:00, when Urban reported that he had arrived at the Berlin warehouse a day early and had to wait there overnight to unload his truck the following morning. The last photo of Urban still alive was taken at a kebab shop near the ThyssenKrupp warehouse at about 14:00.
The family had been unable to contact Urban since 16:00. Żurawski suspected that the truck had been hijacked based on its GPS coordinates, as well as indications that it was being driven erratically. Żurawski later identified the victim found in the truck as his cousin Urban, the original driver of the semi-trailer; Urban was killed by the perpetrator of the attack. According to a post-mortem examination cited by the German media, Urban was shot in the head between 16:30 and 17:30.
Attack on Christmas market.
On 19 December 2016, at 20:10 local time, the perpetrator drove the stolen truck through a Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz in the City West of Berlin, killing 11 people and injuring 56. The incident is the deadliest terrorist attack in Germany since an attack at Oktoberfest in Munich in 1980, which killed 13 people and injured 211 others. The truck came from the direction of Hardenbergstraße, drove about through the market, and destroyed several stalls before turning back onto Budapester Straße and coming to a stop level with the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.
Several witnesses saw the driver leave the truck and flee towards Tiergarten. One witness ran after him.
Łukasz Urban was found dead in the passenger seat of the truck cab; he had been stabbed and shot once in the head with a small-caliber firearm. Investigators initially believed that Urban might still have been alive when the truck reached Breitscheidplatz and might have been stabbed because he tried to stop the attack. Early media reports speculated that he had grabbed the steering wheel, forcing the truck to veer left and crash to a stop, and was then shot at the scene of the crash. If this had been true, this act might have saved many lives. However, later media reports indicated that the truck was brought to a stop by its automatic braking system and Urban was stabbed and shot hours before the attack. No weapons were found at the scene.
The Christmas market reopened on 22 December. Damaged stalls were removed and memorials were set up in their stead. Concrete barriers were placed along sides facing streets.
Victims.
Twelve people died and at least forty-eight were injured throughout the attack. Many of those injured sustained serious injuries and broken bones from either being hit by the truck, or by the collapse of the wooden stalls that were damaged by the truck. Five years after the attack, a first responder to the attack died in 2021 due to injuries he sustained while responding to victims. It is believed that he was wounded by a beam, sustaining serious head injuries.
Investigation.
The police and public prosecutor investigated the incident as a terrorist attack. The Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, said, "We must assume this was a terrorist attack." The German Minister of the Interior, Thomas de Maizière, described the incident as a brutal attack. The U.S. Department of State had previously warned of terrorist attacks on Christmas markets in Europe after ISIL took control of Raqqa and Mosul. ISIL claimed responsibility for the attack shortly after the release of a Pakistani suspect who was mistakenly detained. ;ref name="GmbH 2016 / ISIS" ; ;/ref ;
Initial suspect.
On the evening of 19 December, police arrested a suspect, believed to have driven the truck during the attack, near the Berlin Victory Column. He had aroused suspicion by running away from the scene of the attack out of fear that he would be considered a suspect. The arrested man, initially identified only as Naved B. (later said to be Naved Baloch by the British newspaper "The Guardian"), denied involvement and was later identified as a 23-year-old asylum seeker from Turbat, Pakistan. The Berlin SEK police tactical unit stormed the hangar at the former Berlin Tempelhof Airport, which is used as a refugee camp, where the arrested man lived with six others in a room. His mobile phone was seized and analyzed. Police sources later suggested that they might have arrested "the wrong man" because the individual in custody did not carry gunshot residue or any marks that would indicate that he had been in a fight. Furthermore, forensic tests did not indicate that the suspect was inside the cab of the truck. Police therefore believed that the attacker might still be at large.
German Public Prosecutor General Peter Frank said, "We have to get used to the idea that the man apprehended may not be the perpetrator or belong to the group of perpetrators." The man was released on the evening of 20 December due to lack of evidence. ;ref name="GmbH 2016 / Berlin" ; ;/ref ;
In an interview with "The Guardian" on 29 December, he narrated the incident of his arrest on 19 December. According to him, after leaving a friend's house and crossing a road in central Berlin on the evening of the attack, a car started following him, after which he walked faster. When he realised that it was a police car, he stopped when they asked him to and showed his identification documents to them. He was allowed to go, but was called back seconds later and arrested. He claimed that he was tied up, blindfolded and also slapped by the police after refusing to undress for photographs. He said in the interview that he had gone into hiding, fearing for his life. "The Guardian" also said he had applied for asylum in Germany as a member of a secular separatist movement in Balochistan province of Pakistan.
Anis Amri.
On 21 December, police announced that investigators had found, under the truck's driver's seat, a suspension of deportation permit belonging to Anis Amri, a man who was born in Tataouine, Tunisia, on 22 December 1992. Authorities began a Europe-wide search for Amri. According to investigators, Amri entered Germany from Italy in 2015 and had contacts with the network of the recently arrested Salafist preacher Abu Walaa, a known ISIL recruiter in Germany. Amri was sought by the Federal Criminal Police Office. Officials called for a public manhunt, issuing a recent picture, and offering a reward of €100,000, warning that Amri might be armed and dangerous. He was described as being tall, weighing approximately , with dark hair and brown eyes. ;ref name="GmbH 2016 / manhunt" ; ;/ref ;
Amri fled from Tunisia to escape imprisonment for stealing a truck and arrived for the first time in Europe in 2011 on a refugee raft at the island of Lampedusa. He lied about his age, pretending to be a minor, and was sent to the temporary migrants reception center on the island. At the center, according to Italian security officials, Amri "took part in a particularly violent riot, when the center was set on fire and several people were injured" and was sentenced for it and robbery to four years in prison, which he served in two jails in Sicily. Amri was released in 2015; according to Italian officials, the Tunisian authorities refused to accept his repatriation to Tunisia, and it is believed that he went to Germany around this time. Per an autopsy on his body, it was found that he frequently consumed drugs.
In Tunisia, Amri was sentenced "in absentia" to five years in prison, "reportedly for aggravated theft with violence". Prior to that he had been arrested several times for possession and use of drugs. According to his family, he drank alcohol, took drugs and was initially not religious, but had been radicalized in Italian jails. He arrived in Germany in July 2015 and applied for asylum in April 2016. He used at least 14 different aliases and posed as a citizen of Syria, Egypt or Lebanon. He reportedly had tried to recruit participants for a terrorist attack since the spring, and once tried to buy a pistol from an undercover police officer. He had been overheard by German intelligence offering to carry out a suicide attack, but the German authorities had decided not to arrest him because they deemed him a mere errand boy. The German CID warned in March 2016 that he was planning a suicide attack and recommended immediate deportation. However, the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia ruled that he could not be deported. In Germany he was involved in a bar brawl and drug dealing; later he was involved in a knife attack over drugs in July 2016 and disappeared after police tried to question him. Three weeks before the attack, Moroccan intelligence warned Germany about the terrorist attack planned by him. He had started spending more time in Berlin before the attack and was being closely monitored, but showed no signs of planning a terrorist attack, according to a report submitted by the German Interior Minister to the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia. German authorities were seeking to deport him at the time of the attack, but the legal requirements had not been met because Tunisia initially denied that Amri was their citizen, although documents confirming it arrived in Germany after the attack.
A few minutes after the attack, a surveillance camera spotted him at Berlin Zoologischer Garten railway station which is close to the Christmas market. At the station, he turned to the camera and raised a finger, a gesture commonly used by Islamists. He later left Germany, travelling to the Netherlands, Belgium and France before reaching Italy. On 23 December at around 03:00 CET, Amri was killed in a shootout with police in front of the railway station in Sesto San Giovanni near Milan. He had just arrived by train from Chambéry, France (via Turin). During a routine patrol, two police officers asked to search his backpack after he said he did not have any identity documents. Amri pulled out a gun and shot one of the officers in the shoulder; the other officer shot Amri dead. The Italian Minister of the Interior, Marco Minniti, stated that a policeman had been hospitalized with a shoulder injury. On the same day, Amaq released a video of Amri pledging allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the