Germany’s Merkel Says Full Force of Law to Bear in Berlin Attacks

by Patrick Donahue
December 2016, 1:12 μ.μ. EET

• Germans in mourning after ‘horrific and unimaginable’ attack

• Anti-immigration AfD party lays blame at Merkel’s door

Chancellor Angela Merkel said that German authorities were working on the assumption that the deaths of 12 people after a truck plowed into a Christmas market were a terrorist attack, and pledged to use the full force of German law to bring the perpetrators to justice.

In a nationally televised statement in Berlin, Merkel said that people across Germany were mourning after the “horrific and unimaginable” deaths and injuries sustained in the capital on Monday evening. She said she planned to tour the scene of the attack later on Tuesday.



“This is a very difficult day,” Merkel said. “Like millions of people in Germany, I am horrified, shocked and deeply saddened by what happened yesterday evening on Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz.”

Merkel, dressed all in black for her first public comments on the incident, said that she was convening a meeting of her security cabinet Tuesday to discuss lessons from the suspected attack, adding that there remains much “that we don’t know yet with the required certainty.”

“But based on current evidence we need to assume that this was a terrorist attack,” she said. The investigation will turn up “every detail -- and we will prosecute as thoroughly as the law allows.”

Driver Arrest

The incident is reminiscent of an attack in the French city of Nice in July, when more than 80 died after a truck plowed through late-night crowds celebrating Bastille Day.

Police in the German capital were questioning a suspect arrested near the scene who they believe was the driver of the truck that rammed into crowds on a square in the heart of west Berlin. Germany’s federal prosecutor, who steps in on terror cases or other major crimes targeting state security, took control of the investigation.

Merkel’s open-door refugee policy of last year polarized voters and fed support for the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party, known as the AfD. While the influx of asylum seekers has dropped off substantially this year, the Berlin deaths threaten to further undermine the chancellor’s domestic political standing going into an election year.

“Germany is no longer safe,” AfD co-chairwoman Frauke Petry said in an e-mailed statement. “We must be under no illusions. The breeding ground in which such acts can flourish has been negligently and systematically imported over the past year and a half.”

German media, including Welt newspaper, reported that the driver was a refugee from Pakistan. Bild reported that he was 23 and arrived in Germany in about February this year and had been registered as a refugee. Tagesspiegel said that he was known to the authorities as a small-time criminal. German authorities declined to provide information on the suspect’s identity, saying they would hold a news conference at 2:30 p.m. in Berlin.
“I know that it will be especially difficult for us all to bear if it is confirmed that somebody carried this out who was given protection and asylum in Germany,” Merkel said.