German investigators believe Anis Amri is still in hiding in Berlin, as CCTV footage appears to show the suspect in Monday night’s truck attack on a Christmas market seeking refuge at a mosque in the Moabit district of the German capital.

The newspaper Tagesspiegel reported on Friday that a witness had seen the 24-year-old Tunisian flee the scene of the attack with severe cuts to his face. Police believe his injuries make Amri too easily recognisable to risk travelling outside the capital.

CCTV footage released by the broadcaster RBB appears to show Amri outside a mosque in Moabit on the night after the attack, as well as a few days earlier, on 14 and 15 December.

The mosque on Perleberger Strasse is connected to the Fussilet 33 association, which has in the past been under police surveillance because of alleged attempts to recruit new members for Islamic State. The mosque was raided by police on Thursday but no arrests were made.

The mosque on Perleberger Strasse is a 15-minute walk from the site of Thyssenkrupp, where Polish truck driver Łukasz Urban was due to drop off his cargo on Monday.

The surveillance footage obtained by RBB suggests Amri had not slipped off the security services’ radar as previously assumed, but in fact was able to prepare Monday’s attacks under the noses of investigators.

On Thursday night, the German federal prosecutor said Amri’s fingerprints had been found on the outside of the Polish-registered articulated truck, on the driver’s door and on the vertical support beam in the vehicle’s window area. Germany’s interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, said it was “highly probable” that Amri had carried out the attack.

In Tunisia, two of Amri’s brothers, Walid and Abdelkader, said they believed he may have been radicalised by radical Islamists while he spent almost four years behind bars in Italy.



“He doesn’t represent us or our family,” Abdelkader told Sky News Arabia. “He went into prison with one mentality and when he came out he had a totally different mentality.”

Italian authorities said Amri had been a problematic inmate. The justice ministry said he had repeatedly been admonished and transferred among Sicilian prisons for bad conduct. Prison records say he bullied inmates and tried to spark insurrections.

In all, Amri was held in six different prisons on Sicily, serving three and a half years for starting a fire at a refugee centre and making threats, among other charges. But Italy apparently recorded no signs that Amri was becoming radicalised.



Amri had reached Italy in 2011, along with tens of thousands of other Tunisians men who arrived by boat during the Arab spring.



The suspected involvement of a migrant – one of more than a million allowed into Germany in the past two years – in the attack has intensified political pressure on Angela Merkel, who plans to seek a fourth term as chancellor in elections next year.

Armin Schuster, of her Christian Democratic party, told the broadcaster NDR: “We need to send the signal: only set off for Germany if you have a reason for asylum.”