"Many open questions" and fresh accusations against Berlin's judiciary have emerged in the wake of the suspected Islamist-motivated attack on Berlin's Christopher Street Day (CSD) parade. The opposition believes the government bears responsibility and is demanding disclosure of the communication between the authorities involved. Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) said Tuesday's special session of the Bundestag's Interior Committee had strengthened his resolve to pursue tougher measures against individuals classified as potential threats.
The Greens and the Left Party had requested the committee session. In addition to the interior policy experts of the Bundestag's parliamentary groups and Interior Minister Dobrindt, the meeting, held via video conference, was also attended by the heads of the Federal Police, the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and the domestic intelligence agency (Verfassungsschutz) Dieter Romann, Holger Münch and Sinan Selen respectively, as well as Federal Prosecutor General Jens Rommel and Berlin's Interior Senator Iris Spranger (SPD).
The session addressed the consequences of the attack on July 25, in which a 21-year-old man, suspected of being Islamist-motivated, first drove a delivery van into a crowd on the fringes of the Christopher Street Day demonstration in Berlin's Tiergarten park, before attacking further victims with a bladed weapon. A woman from Poland was killed and 31 other people were injured.
The suspected attacker was classified as a security threat but was free after a court ruling. He was shot dead by police the day after the attack.
The committee session had "shown that many questions remain open," Green Party interior policy expert Marcel Emmerich told the news agency AFP. "How could the Islamist attack happen, why was the suspected perpetrator at liberty, and are there further accomplices?" According to Emmerich, Interior Minister Dobrindt had promised, at the Greens' request, to provide a chronology of events and of the authorities' actions, but had not yet done so.
The Green parliamentary group's spokesperson on domestic affairs described it as a "glaring failure" that the court apparently did not have access to the security authorities' threat classification of the suspected perpetrator "and other relevant findings." It must now be "fully clarified why this information did not reach the court, at what point it was not passed on, and who bears responsibility for that," Emmerich said.
To that end, Dobrindt must "make all the facts about the CSD attack available in a clear and organized way as quickly as possible," the Green Party expert demanded, "so that parliament can comprehensively investigate the background to this dreadful attack."
For his part, Dobrindt stated that it was "incomprehensible" to him how a conviction of the individual classified as a security threat, Abdul B., to one year and ten months could be suspended on probation, "and thus allow him to move about freely." The Interior Minister reaffirmed his plans for tougher action against individuals classified as security threats.
"The rules on probation and juvenile criminal law need to be tightened. Germany needs a nationwide preventive detention regulation to take security-threat individuals out of circulation. There needs to be an expanded ability to order electronic ankle monitoring for such individuals," the Interior Minister stated.
CDU interior policy expert Marc Henrichmann sees no failures on the part of the security authorities. He told AFP he saw "no indications" of an information deficit among investigating authorities. "All the information about the perpetrator was available, that he was classified as a security threat, that he was close to IS [the Islamic State], there was also the usual exchange between the investigating authorities," Henrichmann said.
Instead, the focus should be on the question of "why Berlin's judiciary acted the way it did." The question of why the suspected attacker was sentenced under juvenile criminal law still stood, the CDU politician said.
He pointed to Abdul B.'s attempt to travel to Lebanon in order to join the jihadist militia Islamic State (IS). "That's not something I'd put down to youthful recklessness." Conversely, "in Berlin they apparently concluded that he was so developmentally delayed that adult criminal law could under no circumstances be applied." That, he said, remained "the big question that stays unresolved and has not been clarified."
The German Association of Criminal Police Officers (BDK) advocated for a careful review of the security authorities' actions ahead of the CSD attack. Transparency was important, BDK chairman Dirk Peglow told the "Rheinische Post" (Wednesday edition). The fact that the authorities have not yet made the full chronology of their actions public was "not unusual," he said, given the investigations are still ongoing.
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