| Italian Police officers work next to the body of Anis Amri, the suspect in the Berlin Christmas market truck attack, in a suburb of the northern Italian city of Milan |
Italian police shot dead the man believed to be responsible for this week’s Berlin Christmas market truck attack, killing him after he pulled a gun on them during a routine check in the early hours of Friday.
The suspect – 24-year-old Tunisian Anis Amri – travelled to Italy from France, triggering a spate of criticism from eurosceptics over Europe’s open-border Schengen pact.
A police chief said his men had no idea they might be dealing with Amri when they approached him at around 3am (0200 GMT) outside a station in Sesto San Giovanni, a suburb of the northern city of Milan.
Amri is suspected of driving a truck that smashed through a Berlin market on Monday killing 12 people, and security forces across Europe have been trying to track him down.
The truck mowed through a crowd of people and bulldozed wooden huts selling Christmas gifts and snacks beside a famous church in west Berlin.
Militant group Islamic State acknowledged Amri’s death and his suspected role in the German attack – for which it has claimed responsibility – through its Amaq news agency.
“The executor of the Berlin attacks carries out another attack on Italian police in Milan and is killed in a shoot-out,” it said.
| Handout pictures released by the German Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) Federal Crime Office show suspect Anis Amri |
Milan police chief Antonio De Iesu told reporters that Amri had arrived in Milan’s main railway station from France at around 1am and had then travelled to Sesto San Giovanni, where two young policemen approached him because he looked suspicious.
“We had no intelligence that he could be in Milan,” De Iesu said. “They had no perception that it could be him otherwise they would have been much more cautious.”
| The gun used in the attack was pictured on the ground a short distance from the shooting |
He failed to produce any identification so the police requested he empty his pockets and his small backpack. He pulled a loaded gun from his bag and shot at one of the men, lightly wounding him in the shoulder.
Amri then hid behind a nearby car but the other police officer managed to shoot him once or twice, killing him on the spot. Amri was identified by his finger prints.