A Tunisian man detained on suspicion of involvement in last week’s Berlin truck attack has been released after investigators determined that he was not in contact with the main suspect immediately before the rampage.



The 40-year-old was detained in Berlin on Wednesday. Federal prosecutors said at the time that his telephone number was saved in Anis Amri’s mobile and they suspected he might have been involved.

Their spokeswoman Frauke Koehler said on Thursday that investigators had suspected Amri might have sent him a message and a picture over a messenger service shortly before the attack on a Christmas market on 19 December.

But “further investigations determined that the man who was provisionally detained isn’t this possible contact person of Anis Amri, so he had to be released from custody”, she told reporters.

Amri, a 24-year-old Tunisian, is believed to have driven the truck that plowed into the market, killing 12 people. His fingerprints and wallet were found in the truck. The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the attack and released a video showing Amri pledging allegiance to its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Investigators have determined that the video is genuine, Koehler said.

On 21 December Germany released a Europe-wide wanted notice for Amri, who used a string of different names and nationalities. He was killed in a shootout last Friday with Italian police in a Milan suburb after they stopped him for a routine identity check.

Prosecutors believe he travelled via the Netherlands and France, Koehler said. In Milan, he was carrying a .22 pistol that he used to shoot a police officer, hitting him in the shoulder.

A bullet found in the truck used in the attack was also from a .22 firearm, but ballistic tests have still to confirm whether it was the same weapon, according to Koehler.

The truck’s regular Polish driver was found dead in the cab. Koehler said a provisional autopsy report showed he had died close to the time of the attack, but it was not yet possible to give an exact time.

Koehler confirmed German media reports that the truck had apparently been slowed by an automatic braking system, bringing it to a standstill after 70 to 80 metres (230-260ft) and preventing worse carnage.

Amri, who had previously spent time in prison in Italy, arrived in Germany in July 2015. German authorities tried this year to deport him to Tunisia after his asylum application was rejected.

Italian investigators are trying to determine whether Amri was making use a jihadi network in Italy, his port of entry to Europe in early 2011 amid the Arab spring upheaval.

However, “no particular networks have emerged in Italy”, Paolo Gentiloni, the Italian prime minister, told reporters in Rome.

Authorities in Rome, meanwhile, seized mobile phones during a search of two residences in Rome where Amri stayed in 2015, the Italian news agency Ansa reported. One of the apartments is home to a Tunisian currently in jail for drug dealing.

German authorities had put Amri under covert surveillance for six months earlier this year after a warning from intelligence agencies that he might be planning an attack. The surveillance ended in September after police found no evidence of his alleged plans.

Separately, prosecutors in the western German city of Duisburg said on Thursday that they had opened a fraud investigation against Amri in April but shelved it in November because his whereabouts were unknown. Amri was being investigated for receiving asylum-seeker benefits in two different towns, under different identities, for a few days in late 2015.