German police have detained a 26-year-old Tunisian man over links with the perpetrator of an Islamist truck attack on a Berlin Christmas market that killed 12 people, a federal prosecutors’ spokeswoman said on Wednesday.
Police on Tuesday evening searched the living quarters of the man identified as Bilel A. after he was found to have had dinner with Anis Amri a day before Amri steered a truck through the market on December 19, spokeswoman Frauke Koehler said.
“This contact person is a 26-year-old Tunisian. We are investigating him for possible participation in the attack,” she told reporters.
Amri, 24, also a Tunisian and failed asylum seeker, was killed in a shootout with Italian police on December 23 after fleeing Germany and travelling through the Netherlands, Belgium and France. Islamic State militants claimed responsibility for the Berlin attack.
Koehler said the investigation had shown Amri met the second Tunisian man in a restaurant in central Berlin on the eve of the attack and that the two engaged in “very intense discussions”.
“That triggered the suspicion for us that the suspect, this 26-year-old Tunisian, was possibly involved in the act, or at the very least knew of the attack plans of Anis Amri,” she said.