Italian authorities have announced the deportation of Tunisian migrant Montassar Yaakoubi, a man linked to radical Islamist terrorist Anis Amri who carried out the 2016 Berlin Christmas market terrorist attack.
The Italian Interior Ministry has described the Tunisian as an “associate of the Tunisian terrorist Anis Amri”. The ministry said on Saturday that he had been sent back to Tunisia on a private flight, but did not give the exact date of his deportation.
Mohsen Dali, a spokesman for a Tunis court, said that Yaakoubi was under investigation for his involvement in the Berlin terror attack. However, he had been allowed to go free upon his arrival due to a lack of evidence to connect him to the attack which killed a dozen people and injured many others, Le Dauphiné reports.
The Interior Ministry said that Yaakoubi had hosted Amri in his Italian home before Amri’s move to Germany in June 2015.
Reports have previously claimed that Amri was radicalised while serving a four-year sentence in an Italian prison.
Prior to the attack, Amri interacted with various radical Islamic figures in Berlin, including hate preachers who have been arrested and accused of recruiting fighters for Islamic State.
Since the attack, controversy has erupted over what police knew about Amri and why the failed asylum seeker had not been deported after being arrested on prior drug trafficking charges.
Former German Federal Prosecutor Bruno Jost, a special investigator into the terror attack, went as far as to claim Berlin police had manipulated files relating to Amri and could have captured him before the attack took place.
Jost later noted that investigators even took time off from observing Amri on holidays and weekends and said they had only monitored him “sporadically”.
Investigations into the attack were still ongoing as of November of last year, nearly three years after the attack took place.
Populist Alternative for Germany MP Beatrix von Storch, who is a member of the investigation committee, told Breitbart London: “The investigation committee wasted a year hearing irrelevant testimony, and now that we have the first real witness, we find out why: the German government was warned of Anis Amri as a potential terrorist, explicitly and concretely, almost a year ahead of time, and did everything they could to prevent the attack – from being prevented.”