Members of German parliament want to question deported Amri friend
Bilal Ben Ammar was a confidant of the Christmas market assassin. On the eve of the attack he met Anis Amri. According to FOCUS Magazine information, he helped Amri escape from the scene — and was deported shortly afterwards. After the revelations, the authorities are now dealing with the case again.
On 1 February 2017, Bilal Ben Ammar lands in Tunis as one of 118 passengers on a scheduled flight. On board, the deportee behaved calmly, they say afterwards. What he knew about the plans of his friend Anis Amri is still unclear.
Now Ben Ammar is to be heard after all
The Bundestag’s (german parliament) committee of inquiry into the Berlin Christmas market attack will soon question Ben Ammar, the deported friend of the later assassin Anis Amri, as a witness. According to the committee’s statement on Friday, most of the members are in favour of a decision on evidence after the FOCUS revelations. It remains to be seen, however, whether Ben Ammar will be questioned in Berlin or abroad.
Members of the opposition find the speed with which the German authorities pushed for the deportation of this compatriot and close confidant of Amri suspicious.
Deported to cover up entanglements
They ask themselves whether something should possibly be hushed up — for instance, that the endangerers Amri and Ben Ammar were not taken from the street because they were hoped for interesting information about other Islamists willing to use violence at home and abroad. “There is a considerable interest on the part of the security authorities and the Federal Ministry of the Interior that the deportation should be successful,” says an e-mail to the Federal Police dated 28 December 2016, available to FOCUS.
“The deportation of a danger, which did not work out for Anis Amri for months in 2016, was a matter of days after the attack on Bilal Ben Ammar,” said FDP chairman Benjamin Strasser of the investigative committee of the German Press Agency.
Already on 19 January — one month after the biggest Islamist terrorist attack in Germany — an employee of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, then still under the control of Thomas de Maizière (CDU), wrote in an e-mail to Interior State Secretary Emily Haber: “Happy news: Saxony has filed the deportation detention petition” — and was also prepared to represent it in court in Berlin.
Tunisia recognizes Ben Ammar as a citizen
At the intervention of the Federal Criminal Police Office, Tunisia had recognized B.A. as a Tunisian citizen. At that time, the Islamist was in custody for social welfare fraud. During his interrogation, he had stated that he had repeatedly bought cocaine from Amri because he had given him the drug at a friend price.
Amri’s asylum application had been rejected. On 19 December 2016, the Tunisian hijacked a truck and raced it to the Christmas market at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, thus killing twelve people. After the attack, the Tunisian, who used several false identities in Germany, was able to flee to Italy. There he was shot by the police. How he came to Italy and whether he possibly had escape helpers has not yet been clarified.
Schuster considers questioning abroad useful
Ben Ammar came to Germany in 2014 together with other Tunisians. In Berlin on February 19, 2016, he was classified as a danger. The evening before the attack, he ate with Amri in a restaurant. Like Amri, he was a follower of the terrorist militia Islamic State (IS). A participation in the preparation of the attack could not be proven to him.
On 1 February 2017 he was flown directly from prison to Tunisia and handed over to the authorities there. He is said to have been in Tunisia a few months ago. According to reports, he was not detained there. The chairman of the committee, Armin Schuster (CDU), reported that a re-entry bans for the Schengen area had been imposed on the deportee. For this reason, he personally considered a questioning abroad to be sensible.
Ben Ammar is no stranger in Tunisia
Bilal Ben Ammar was no stranger to the Tunisian authorities, even though he hadn’t attracted attention as a terrorist at home. An official of the Federal Ministry of the Interior wrote in an internal mail that the accusations against him in Tunisia were participation in demonstrations, “sabotage” and illegal departure to Libya, “so that perhaps not necessarily the death penalty threatens”.
In a message sent by a federal police officer to his colleagues on 20 January 2017, a meeting with a diplomat from the Tunisian embassy in Berlin was described: “When the name Ben Ammar was mentioned, the first reaction of Mr. S. made it clear that he could do something with the name. But Mr. S. did not deal with it in the following”.
Seehofer has deportation investigated
On Thursday evening, the investigating committee also discussed recordings of the scene of the crime at the Gedächtniskirche (church), on which Bilal Ben Ammar is supposed to be seen. Members of the committee stated that they did not have any such recordings.
A speaker of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office said that at the time of the attack at Breitscheidplatz (place) there had been “no further suspects on the spot” according to the current state of investigations. The investigations against Bilal Ben Ammar were “discontinued due to a lack of sufficient suspicion”. Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) now wants to have the deportation investigated.
In documents of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) available to the German Press Agency, there is talk of a man with blue disposable gloves, who was noticed on a crime scene photo. However, the suspicion that the person depicted could be Bilal Ben Ammar could not be substantiated.
Ben Ammar apparently spied out Breitscheidplatz
But something else is conspicuous: In a note of the BKA, which was written about three months after the deportation, it is said that Ben Ammar had chosen the Breitscheidplatz several times “as photo motive, whereby first pictures of the Breitscheidplatz from February and March 2016 photograph the later entrance area of the tat vehicle, which gives the impression of a spying out against the background of the attack happening”.
The former president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Hans-Georg Maaßen, had described Amri as a “pure police case” after the attack. This was contradicted by a witness in the investigating committee. The head of the Berlin State Criminal Investigation Office, Christian Steiof, said Amri “was not a pure police case and should never have been regarded as such”.
On November 2, 2016, Amri was the subject of a meeting at the Joint Terror Defense Centre of the Federal Government and the Länder (GTAZ). At that time, the BfV was asked to investigate indications from the Moroccan secret service of possible Amri attack plans.
The question as to why the domestic secret service received this order and not the foreign secret service BND, for example, was still unanswered, said the Green chairwoman Irene Mihalic. She hoped for “conclusive explanations and answers” from the interrogation of a BND employee planned for February 21.
