The German government has identified 62 dangerous Islamists that it wants to deport to their native countries but is having issues because many of them lack proper identification.

Germany has been having great difficulty deporting failed asylum seekers who come mainly from the North and West African regions despite many of them being convicted criminals. New revelations suggest that the deportation problem has extended even to known Islamists that the government sees as a threat.

Many Islamist suspects do not have the correct identification documents lack the proper paperwork for their countries of origin to take them back, Die Welt reports.

The 62 Islamists who have been classified by the police as “vulnerable” are part of a group of 224 identified Islamist supporters and potential terrorists. Police say that 80 of those Islamists are already in custody.

The police force and the domestic intelligence agency, known as the Office for the Protection of the Consitution, believe the suspects all have the potential and are likely to carry out terror operations in the country.

The Islamists have been identified by police in the wake of the Berlin terror attack last month which killed 12 and injured close to 50 others at a Christmas market near the centre of the city.

The attacker, Tunisian asylum seeker Anis Amri, had been known to police long before the attack and was supposed to have been deported, his return stalled by his lack of proper paperwork.

Amri was known by authorities to have had cconnections with Islamic State terror who claimed responsibility or the attack.

According to investigators, Amri had contact with at least 20 mosques across Germany, many of them adhering to the radical Salafist philosophy that Islamic State endorses.

One of the mosques he visited was the DIK Mosque in Hildesheim which authorities say has become a hotbed for Islamic State recruitment and Salafist teaching. Amri is said to have encouraged Salafist followers to stage their own attacks.

Responses to the lack of deportation have been mixed. Joachim Herrmann of the conservative Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) has demanded the arrest of Islamists who have no documents while others, like Justice Minister Heiko Maas of the Socialist party, have argued that Islamists could be tagged with ankle bracelets to allow authorities to keep tabs on their movements.

Many questions surrounding the background of the Berlin attack still remain unanswered. CSU politician Stephan Mayer said he could not understand why the left-wing Berlin city coalition government had not set up an investigation themselves. “Mistakes in the security authorities must be analysed, reprocessed, and consistently remedied,” he said.

The Berlin “red-red-green” government recently released a paper indicating they are more concerned with tackling right-wing extremism than Islamic terrorism and failed to acknowledge that left-wing extremism even existed.