A.n December 19, five years ago, Anis Amri, a member of the terrorist organization “Islamic State” (IS), shot and killed a truck driver in Berlin and set off for the center of the capital with his articulated lorry. A little later he drove the truck into the Christmas market on Breitscheidplatz, crushed stalls, dragged visitors along, rolled them over. Amri immediately killed twelve people. Only in October was the 13 deaths to be mourned. A first aider at the time died from severe head injuries. This is not the only reason why the worst jihadist attack to date in Germany is depressingly present.
Several committees of inquiry in the federal and state levels dealt with or are still dealing with the long list of failures, misjudgments and mishaps in the Amri case, as in North Rhine-Westphalia. The Berlin authorities subverted a particularly large number. The Tunisian police and the protection of the constitution, who lived in North Rhine-Westphalia and Berlin, were known to the federal and state governments as a highly mobile threat even months before his attack. Amri was also a social cheater and drug dealer, a rejected asylum seeker who had to leave the country and who could have been detained or taken out of the country. Thanks to an informant, the security authorities also knew that Amri had offered himself up as an assassin in radical Salafist circles at the end of 2015; There were also alarming findings from foreign secret services. A year later, Amri was able to carry out his terrorist attack.
All the more important are signs like the one that the North Rhine-Westphalian Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst (CDU) set at the commemoration of the state parliament on Thursday. Mistakes had occurred which, taken together, would have made the heinous crime possible in the first place. “So I ask all the victims for forgiveness on behalf of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia,” said Wüst and assured him that one had learned from mistakes.
300 additional positions in NRW alone
North Rhine-Westphalia alone has deported 72 “security-relevant people” in the past four years, including around 40 people who were at risk. This happened several times on the basis of Section 58a of the Residence Act, which at the time in the Amri case it was believed they could not be used. The paragraph is considered the sharpest sword of the right of residence and allows a foreigner to be deported on the basis of “a factual forecast to ward off a particular threat to the security of the Federal Republic of Germany or a terrorist threat”. NRW has increased its state security in police headquarters, the district police authorities and the State Criminal Police Office by around 300 positions. As was the case before the Amri case at the federal level, there is now also a state-owned anti-terrorism center, in which all relevant municipal and state authorities regularly deal with threats in so-called case conferences.
One important improvement is “RADAR-iTE”, a three-stage model developed jointly by the Federal Criminal Police Office and scientists from the University of Konstanz. At the end of the analysis there is a classification into one of three categories, which is binding for all security authorities: “moderate risk”, “conspicuous risk” and “high risk”. In the Amri case, the authorities were fatally unable to agree on a uniform assessment.
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