Lag in identifying suspect in truck attack compounds concerns that country’s authorities aren’t up to the challenge
BERLIN—German authorities are facing mounting criticism for failing to neutralize the man suspected in Monday’s truck attack, a petty criminal who had long been on the radar of security services.
A cascade of mishaps before and since the attack—and parallels with another case two months ago—raise concerns that Germany’s intelligence and law-enforcement systems, as well as its methods for vetting migrants, may not be up to the challenge posed by the terrorists now threatening Europe.
“They had intelligence, prisoners who told them Islamic State wanted to mount attacks in London, Paris and Berlin. But still they thought they are protected, despite all attempts,” said Claude Moniquet, a Brussels-based counterterrorism expert and former French intelligence agent. “An attack can happen in any country, but they weren’t prepared.”
To be sure, German authorities have dismantled numerous terror plots this year, and countries reputed for their tough terror laws, such as France, have suffered devastating attacks.
Several laws passed in Germany this year have extended the remit of intelligence agencies, for instance by allowing security forces to put minors under surveillance. The government on Wednesday approved a bill allowing the use of video surveillance in public places, a move already in train before Monday’s attack.
Stopping Terror: Missed Opportunities
Before many previous attacks, authorities had early indications of terrorist intentions but for one reason or another didn’t follow through.
Turkish authorities blocked Brahim Abdeslam from entering the country in early 2015, suspecting he was headed to Syria, and sent him back to Belgium. Around the same time, Belgian police interviewed him and his brother Salah Abdeslam on suspicion they had become radicalized. The case was dropped after authorities concluded neither was a terror threat. Belgian authorities suspected Mohamed Abrini was radicalized and had his family home under surveillance in the days before the attacks, when he is believed to have driven Salah Abdeslam to Paris.
4 dead
The U.S. warned France that the brothers Said and Chérif Kouachi were in contact with someone in Yemen and that one of them had possibly traveled to that country, known for harboring militant-training camps. That prompted French authorities to monitor the two men, but the surveillance operation was eventually shut down.
Amedy Coulibaly, a close friend of the Kouachis and a known extremist, was convicted of attempting to break an Islamic radical out of jail, but was released from jail early.
Belgian police were wiretapping Khalid el-Bakraoui’s phone in the weeks before his suicide bomb attack on Brussels airport. They arrested him after hearing suspicious conversations and discovered Islamist materials on his computer. He was released for lack of evidence. Turkey deported his brother, Ibrahim el-Bakraoui to the Netherlands in June 2015, suspecting he was trying to reach Syria. The Dutch authorities released him for lack of further evidence; he blew himself up at the Maalbeek subway station.
Omar Mateen, a U.S.-born son of Afghan immigrants, was twice investigated by the FBI over hints of radical leanings, but the cases were closed as inconclusive.
Federal authorities knew U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a military psychiatrist who shot and killed 13 people, had communicated with radical Yemeni cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki by email, but concluded it didn’t warrant further investigation.
Moroccan national Ayoub El Khazzani had been flagged as a radical by Spanish authorities. He evaded surveillance by crossing European borders, living for a time in France and Germany before spending a few weeks with Islamic State.
Anis Amri, the Tunisian man now being sought as the perpetrator of Monday’s deadly truck attack, landed on the intelligence services’ radar soon after arriving in Germany from Italy last year for his ties to a radical Islamic preacher and suspected Islamic State contacts. German officials said his asylum claim was rejected and blamed Tunisia for not issuing the documents enabling his deportation until Wednesday. The Tunisian government declined to comment on the accusation but said the man was a wanted fugitive thereafter being convicted of an armed robbery.
In March, federal security agencies tipped off Berlin prosecutors that Mr. Amri may have been planning a burglary to fund the purchase of weapons destined for an attack, the prosecutors’ office said on Wednesday.
The Berlin authorities’ surveillance determined that Mr. Amri was a small-time drug dealer and might have been involved in a violent incident in a bar, but ended the monitoring in September after it uncovered no evidence for any broader plot, the prosecutors said.
Intelligence officials continued to sporadically monitor the man, but sometime between late November and early December they lost his trace, a security official said.
Even if the Tunisian government dragged its feet on issuing the right papers for him to be deported, “Ultimately this was on Germany’s watch; they were supposed to monitor him and they didn’t,” Mr. Moniquet said.
Successive mishaps in a separate case suggest the flaws in Germany’s antiterror effort run through the entire length of its security apparatus, from its long underfunded domestic intelligence to its police work and prison system.
In October, a police SWAT team stormed a flat in the eastern German city of Chemnitz in search of Jaber Albakr, a man suspected of planning a suicide bomb attack on a Berlin airport. He managed to flee on foot, partly because the officers’ tactical equipment was too heavy for them to catch up, security officials said at the time. Inside the flat, officers discovered large quantities of homemade TATP explosive.
Mr. Albakr was later caught in Leipzig—not by police but by Syrian refugees who restrained him and handed him over. Once he was detained, the Leipzig prison staff couldn’t immediately locate an interpreter to question him. When the prison’s psychologist finally interviewed him, she decided Mr. Albakr wasn’t a suicide risk. Two days after he was detained, Mr. Albakr’s lifeless body was found hanged in his cell.
Compared with France and the U.S., Germany is newer to facing the terror threat, a U.S. official said, adding more needs to be done in the country to overcome privacy concerns and allow deeper coordination among authorities on cases of interest.
“They need to continue to work on sharing between law enforcement and intelligence agencies,” said a U.S. official. “There is always room for improvement.” Because of legal limitations, Germany has no equivalent to the FBI, which has both an intelligence and a law-enforcement function.
Faced with such criticism in the past, German security officials have often pointed to restrictive laws that set some of the most extensive privacy protections in the world and strictly limit the monitoring and detention of people who haven’t yet committed a crime. They have also at times criticized the courts for dragging their feet on authorizing the surveillance of suspects.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has promised to crack down on rejected asylum applicants and pledged that 2015’s large-scale influx of asylum applicants wouldn’t be repeated. But many critics, including in Ms. Merkel’s own party, have called for a tougher line, and her allies fear she will lose voters to an upstart anti-immigrant party when she runs for a fourth term next year.
The head of the country’s conference of state interior ministers called earlier on Wednesday for stricter border controls and vetting of potential migrants. “There are numerous refugees nationwide who we do not know where they come from, and there is the potential for uncertainty,” Klaus Bouillon, the interior minister of the state of Saarland and a member of Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats, told a German newspaper.
Around 150 protesters gathered in front of Ms. Merkel’s office in Berlin, the chancellery, Wednesday evening to demand her resignation.
A scruffy gray-haired man with a thick Berlin accent, who identified himself as 62-year-old Jürgen Matschiavelli said the first time that East Germany’s Stasi secret police hauled him off was in the 1970s for tearing down a communist flag. Now, he said he felt again that he was ruled by an unsympathetic government that arbitrarily decided to allow refugees to flood across the border without consulting the citizens.
“We’re not Nazis. We are the people,” he said. “I screamed that in 1990 and now I’m doing it again!”