The man who mounted last month's deadly terrorist attack in Berlin had 14 aliases and was well known to the German security authorities, officials said on Thursday, as investigators stepped up their probe into one of his associates. The aliases used by Anis Amri, a 24-year-old Tunisian national who ploughed a truck into a crowded Berlin Christmas market on December 19, are set out in a report by criminal investigators presented to the parliament in Germany's western state of North Rhine-Westpahlia. "The attack was carried out by a man whom security officials across Germany were very well aware of," State Interior Minister Ralf Jaeger told a special meeting of the state's parliamentary interior committee. Authorities now consider the Tunisian associate of Amri, detained on Tuesday on fraud charges, as dangerous, believing he was a member of the Salafist Islamic movement and was capable of taking radical action, German media reported. The 26-year-old man had dinner with Amri in a Berlin restaurant the night before the attack, which killed 12 people, and the two men held "an intensive conversation," according to Frauke Koehler, a spokeswoman for the federal German prosecutors' office. The daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported that the two men travelled together from Italy to Germany last year, with Amri having since then divided his time between Berlin and North Rhine-Westpahlia. Dieter Schuermann, who heads up North Rhine-Westpahlia's state criminal office, described to the meeting of the state parliamentary interior had the state and federal authorities had investigated concerns that Amri could mount a terrorist attack. However, they had failed to find concrete evidence of any plans, he said.
