Tunisia arrests 3 suspects linked to Berlin attack perpetrator

Tunisia says its security forces have arrested three suspected terrorists linked to Anis Amri, the Tunisian national believed to be the perpetrator of the Berlin Christmas market attack that claimed the lives of a dozen people.

According to a statement released by the North African country’s Interior Ministry on Saturday, Amri’s nephew was among the trio, aged between 18 and 27, who were detained on Friday and were all members of a “terrorist cell... connected to the terrorist Anis Amri.”

Amri, 24, who was killed in a shootout with police in the northern Italian city of Milan on Friday, was believed to have hijacked a 40-ton truck and used it to mow down holiday revelers at a crowded Christmas market outside the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church near Berlin's Zoo station, on Monday evening, killing 12 people and injuring 50 others.

The Berlin deadly rampage was claimed by the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group, which released a video on Friday purportedly showed Amri as pledging allegiance to the terror group’s ringleader. It added that the assault was a response to Germany's contribution to the so-called international coalition led by the United States that purportedly carries out airstrikes against Daesh in Iraq and Syria.

The Tunisian ministry further said that Amri had transferred a sum of money to his nephew, with whom he had communicated via social media, and also shared his Takfiri ideology with him, urging him “to pledge allegiance to Daesh.”

The Friday arrests come as German authorities are racing to find out whether Amri had received assistance from accomplices prior and after the carnage. German security services are also under fire for failure in netting Amri as he tried to slip through the border and enter Italy, despite a blanket security measure that had been enforced across the country to hunt him down.

“It is very important for us to determine whether there was a network of accomplices... in the preparation or the execution of the attack, or the flight of the suspect,” Germany’s federal prosecutor Peter Frank said on Friday.

The rampage claimed the lives of seven German nationals and five others from the Czech Republic, Italy, Israel, Poland and Ukraine.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has also pledged a “comprehensive” investigation on how Amri was able to slip through the security net.

Amri left his home country and entered Italy in 2011, spending four years in jail there for starting a fire in a refugee center there, during which he was believed to have been radicalized.

In 2015, he showed up in Germany and took advantage of Europe's Schengen system of open borders to make his way to Italy this week.

Daesh also claimed a similar attack in France's southern city of Nice in July, when a truck plowed into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day. More than 80 people were killed in the attack.

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