Photo Gallery Serious Shortcomings
Forensics experts gather evidence next to the body of Anis Amri on Dec. 23, just days after he committed a deadly terrorist act in Berlin. Amri was a career criminal, known to the authorities in his home country of Tunisia, in Italy and Germany. He had even been the subject of investigations and surveillance in Germany, where the rejected asylum-seeker was identified as a potential Islamist threat.
His name was well-known to security and intelligence agencies across the country and he had even been the subject of discussions at meetings of the Joint Counter-Terrorism Center (GTAZ), the German body that brings together members of all of the country's leading authorities in efforts to prevent terrorist acts. Here, the GTAZ control room in Berlin.
The failure to prevent Amri from acting is heating up a conflict over migration and refugees between Chancellor Angela Merkel of the conservative Christian Democratic Union and Horst Seehofer, the head of its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union. For months now, Seehofer has been calling for a ceiling on the number of refugees taken in by the country and for stricter deportation and security polices.
Amri also managed to spend days fleeing after the terrorist attack, traveling through Germany, the Netherlands and France before finally getting caught in a random check by police in Milan, Italy, during which he was shot to death. He was believed to be a potential threat by both German authorities and those in Italy, where he first arrived as a refugee in 2011.
The deportation of an asylum-seeker in 2015 at the Leipzig-Halle Airport: The authorities had sought to deport Anis Amri months before his attack, but they were unable to because he lacked the proper identity papers. It was the same exasperating game German authorities have confronted for years: More than 70 percent of asylum-seekers arrive in Germany without passports.
