Police officers’ homes raided accused of cover up over Berlin terror attack
POLICE have raided the addresses of five colleagues in Berlin suspected of falsifying information in the files of Christmas market killer Anis Amri to cover up official bungling.
Chaotic scenes in Berlin as truck ploughs into market
The State Criminal Office employees' mobile phones were seized to see if they had been communicating with one another in the wake of the allegations of a conspiracy to cover their tracks.
Berlin's interior minister Andreas Geisel said low-life drug dealer Amri should have been picked up and charged with narcotics offences long before he murdered 12 and wounded dozens more with a hijacked lorry on December 19 last year.
Police officers’ homes raided accused of cover up over Berlin terror attack
And he further alleged there had been a police cover-up later as authorities scrambled to deflect the blame.
Geisel said he had launched a criminal complaint against "persons unknown" inside the department.
Failed asylum seeker Amri, from Tunisia, was an ISIS sleeper in Germany. He was gunned down by Italian police while on the run in Milan four days after the attack.
Twelve were killed in the horror smash
Afterwards it was learned a series of attempts to deport Amri had failed and he was free in Germany to perfect his terror plot and maintain contacts with numerous Jihadists.
Amri had been under surveillance since March 2016 in Berlin but he fell off the radar when security services believed him to be just a drug peddler.
Geisel now says police knew he was not just a small-time drug dealer but had been engaged in commercial-scale, organised drug trafficking.
Failed asylum seeker Amri, from Tunisia, was an ISIS sleeper in Germany.
He said: "Police could easily have obtained an arrest warrant for this.”
Geisel also alleged one or more police involved had later forged a document in the cover-up of their failings.
A file mentioning Amri had dealt with only small quantities of illegal drugs was apparently written on January 17 - but backdated to November 1.
Politicians in Berlin spoke of "grave consequences" for the State Criminal Office if an internal probe now underway proves a cover up took place.