Politic?

Innocuous Intelligence Hints?

"When I saw the picture of my brother in the media, I couldn't believe my eyes. I'm in shock, and can't believe it's him who committed this crime."
"If he's guilty, the deserves every condemnation. We reject terrorism and terrorists -- we have no dealings with terrorists."
Abdelkader Amri, Tunisia

Mustapha Amri, father of Mr. Amri, in Oueslatia, a town in the midwest region of Tunisia. Credit Zoubeir Souissi/Reuters

"[It would be] totally disgusting [to blame Ms. Merkel for the Berlin Christmas market attack]."
"But we have to acknowledge that there is a connection between the refugee crisis and the increase in Islamic terror cases. There is a new dimension of terror now and we have to make sure that our society doesn’t get torn apart if this polarization continues."
"It’s [the controversy over German acceptance of a million Muslim refugees and haven seekers] certainly not gotten easier for her."
Stephan Mayer, lawmaker, Germany conservative alliance

A freshly-minted 24, it seems that this Tunisian-born jihadist went on a birthday spree to prove unequivocally his faithful dedication to Islamist jihad. He might have been even more successful in his scorecard of death had he not been challenged by the Polish driver whose truck he had commandeered. It seems likely from the evidence and supposition gathered and imagined by investigators that the unfortunate Lukasz Urban sacrificed his own life to prevent an even greater toll by grasping the steering wheel to turn it from driving straight into the thick of the Christmas market shopping crowd.

What more evidence might be sought other than the discovery of Anis Amri's identity documentation, along with a handful of false identity papers under various aliases in three nationalities. The criminal record he amassed in both Italy and Tunisia verify the attitudes and criminal propensities this young man brought to all his interactions with the public and the police. His crimes netted him a four-year vacation from civilian life as an incarcerant in an Italian prison. A committed criminal and vicious religious psychopath.

His fingerprints were identified in the cab of the truck in which the dead Polish truck driver was found, mauled and bloodied in his struggle with the hijacker, shot to death at close range by the mass murderer. A known supporter of terrorist groups, he was also identified as a disciple of a well-known preacher of religious hatred toward others. In German intelligence sights, he nonetheless was granted a stay from expulsion reflecting his lack of a passport identifying him as a Tunisian. Might this man's background and obvious inclinations have cleared him of suspicion as a potential attacker?

German intelligence seemed to feel that way. And Germany's justice system appears to have guided their ultimate decision; no hard proof of criminal malfeasance waiting to happen, so he could not be detained for over 24 hours. Too few intelligence personnel to adequately follow the 500 suspected Islamist jihadists currently happily ensconced in Germany, so authorities trust to luck. And luck was busy elsewhere this week. And for that twelve people paid with their lives while dozens will have the scars of their injuries to live with to remind them of their victimhood status.

Germany, that high-minded pacifist nation that morphed from its mid-20th-Century lunacy in genocide saw to it that the jihadist, thought to have been wounded during his slaughter-fest, since his blood was also found in the truck cab, appears to have been treated at a German hospital before taking advantage of the EU's Schengen zone open borders for transients, leading to an international hunt and a generous, but not overwhelmingly-so, offer of reward for information leading to this man's capture. Dead or alive, one assumes.

Now that the unthinkable has disturbed German complacency at the time-bomb in their midst, with the administration coaching the news media to look away and 'forget' to report on the growing incidents of criminal activities and violent assaults occurring from within that vast refugee community, the government has plans to introduce new surveillance laws that may disrupt future such deadly attacks; at the very least allow police to hold and interrogate suspected jihadists for longer than 24 hours' detention.

Away back in March this man who was naturally inclined to become a 'soldier' of Islamist jihad had been placed under surveillance on the basis of a tip he could be planning to commit theft to enable financing of automatic weapons useful in the event of committing a terrorist attack. That old adage, that where there is smoke there is fire appears to have been shunted aside. And it seems that the sharing of information on criminal activity and suspicion of Islamist violence has not been shared among EU national justice departments as forewarning.

But then, how unsurprising that is, given that within Germany as well, information that one state's police groups establish fails to be shared with that of others'. Surveillance of this danger to the public was removed in September leaving him to disappear underground so that police could no longer track him. Now they have renewed interest in tracking him after the fact of a deadly rampage shocking the country to the core with the realization that it too has become a target, and it has its own elite political decision-makers to thank for that.