The radical circles Anis Amri moved in were well known to German officials, but that wasn’t enough to stop him.
Amri, the suspect in Monday’s deadly Berlin attack who was killed in a Milan shootout on Friday, first came to the attention of state intelligence officials last year, security officials say. Shortly after he was registered as an asylum seeker in a small town of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Tunisian began showing up in the entourage of a radical Iraqi-born preacher, Abu Walaa, whom intelligence officials say they had been watching for some time.
Soon after that, Amri visited Fussilet 33 e.V., a Berlin-based Muslim association that German intelligence agencies see as one of the capital’s main meeting groups for adherents of the fundamentalist Salafi branch of Islam, other security officials said.
The association’s premises were searched by police on Thursday, according to one security official. On Friday, Berlin officials said they may move to ban the group, whose representatives couldn’t be reached for comment.
“We are going to take a closer look at Fussilet 33 now, after the attack brought it into the spotlight,” said Berlin state interior minister Andreas Geisel after a meeting with the domestic affairs committee of Berlin’s legislature on Friday.
Amri’s case is drawing attention to radical Muslim groups across Germany that the country’s security authorities say pose an increasing challenge in the fight against violent Islamist ideology and terrorism.
“These people know where to find each other,” said one of the people familiar with Amri’s movements around Germany.
Salafist mosques and prayer groups have long been seen by authorities as breeding grounds for such ideas, and many of them are under the surveillance of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. But drawing the line between constitutionally protected freedom of religion and potentially violent extremism is one of the toughest quandaries Germany’s security apparatus faces, experts and officials say.
A case in point is Fussilet 33, which runs a small mosque and hosts religious lectures and seminars in the working-class Moabit neighborhood, where Mr. Amri spent much of his time.
The Berlin arm of the domestic intelligence agency describes Fussilet 33—named for a verse of the Quran—as a meeting spot for Salafists. In September 2015, a Berlin court sentenced a man identified as Murat S. to four years of prison for traveling three times to Syria, where he received weapons training and served as a guard for the terror organization Junud al-Sham.
The man, of Turkish nationality, associated with the then-chairman of Fussilet 33, Ismet D., who incited mainly Turks and people from the Caucasus region to join jihad in Syria, according to a report from the Berlin state intelligence agency.
Ismet D. is currently on trial in Berlin, accused of financing and supporting the terror group Junud al-Sham, according to agency’s report. A representative for Mr. Ismet couldn’t be reached for comment.
Despite their concerns about Fussilet 33, Berlin authorities never banned the group. An expert committee, officials said, advised the state government to await the outcome of trials of Ismet D. and others still under way.
Authorities can ban religious associations but because such action is seen as a strong infringement against the principles of freedom of religion and speech, the hurdles are high. Officials must prove a group advocates an “aggressive, militant posture,” Germany’s constitutional court has ruled. That standard is hard to meet, experts say, since even the most radical preachers and mosques take pains to publicly position themselves against violence, experts say.
German authorities are now scrambling to investigate whether some people Amri knew in radical Salafist groups also helped him in planning the attack or fleeing the country, officials said.
“They are incubators for people with a tendency for violence,” said Thomas Mücke, co-head of the Violence Prevention Network, a nonprofit association that works to distance radical Islamic teenagers and young people from violent ideas. “Nearly all the people we know who traveled to Syria had some form of connection to the Salafi community beforehand.”
Abu Walaa, with whom Mr. Amri also associated, was an Iraqi national known as the “preacher without a face” for preaching with his back turned to camera in videos posted to social media. He also taught in a mosque in Hildesheim in Lower Saxony.
In November, police arrested Abu Walaa on suspicion of recruiting fighters for Islamic State.
Mr. Amri was also in touch with at least two of the preacher’s associates who taught Arabic and radical Islamic ideology to willing recruits, according to a person briefed on the case. One of these associates, Hasan C., played a role in radicalizing a teenager who threw a bomb at a Sikh temple in the city of Essen earlier this year, security officials say. Both associates were also taken into custody with Abu Walaa in November.
“For us it’s now of great importance to establish whether [Amri] had a network of supporters or aides or accomplices in preparing and committing the crime and also while he was on the run,” Federal Prosecutor-General Peter Frank said Friday.
Politicians focusing on domestic affairs said the debate about what more can be done to crack down on such hotbeds for radicals was only beginning. In January, federal ministers plan to discuss lessons to be drawn from the case.
“We have to achieve a situation where they know that we are on their heels 24 hours,” said Burkhardt Lischka, a Social Democrat and member of the federal parliament’s internal affairs committee. “And if someone defends jihadism, recruits fighters or spreads messages of hatred, they must be banned.”