At first it was a story of heroism. A witness to the Berlin attack put aside his horror and surreptitiously followed the man he believed to be the lorry terrorist through Berlin’s Tiergarten park.
Police were alerted and quickly detained the suspect, a 23-year-old asylum seeker from Pakistan. He was held for more than 20 hours but last night he was released without charge. It appears the Berlin “hero” had the wrong man.
Federal prosecutors conceded that no evidence had been found against the man, named in reports as Naved B, and forensic investigation points to somebody else being in the lorry’s cab when it charged through one of the city’s biggest Christmas markets.
The suspect had been taken by plane to Karlsruhe, southwestern Germany, for interrogation by federal investigators in the hours after his arrest, a move reserved for terrorists.
Back in Berlin, as the hours ticked by, police cloaked growing doubts about his guilt in a tweet yesterday afternoon: “The temporarily arrested suspect denies the offence. Therefore we are particularly alert. Please be also alert.” The subtext was clear: an armed terrorist was at large and the manhunt goes on.
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As they hunted a new suspect, police began identifying victims and more witnesses came forward.
Inaki Ellakuria, 21, a Spanish student, said he heard the lorry hit the first stall near the market entrance and turned around to find it bearing down on him. His left shin and calf bones were broken, along with his right foot. “I’m feeling fine thanks to the drugs they have given me,” he said yesterday. “But it was the most unbearable pain of my life.”
Sarah Dobler, 26, from Port Talbot, said she held the hand of a man with a severe head injury until an ambulance arrived. “I just held his hand, told him everything is going to be OK. I don’t know how he is now, but I hope he’s OK.” Rhys Meredith, from Cardiff, described seeing “two rivers of blood” in the aftermath of the attack. “Nobody was really helping anybody. People were running. It was like every man for themselves. It was dusty and chaotic.”
Luke Theis and Lara Colombo, American tourists, were walking across the square towards stalls that were crushed by the lorry. “We started seeing people running and hearing ambulances from all directions so we walked over. It was carnage everywhere. There was blood all over the floor,” Mr Theis said. “There were people lying on the floor, I am not sure what their condition was. I could count about eight lying down.”
Police reinforcements were drafted into the city yesterday as workers placed concrete barriers in front of entrances to Christmas markets. Gradually, the narrative of the attack emerged.
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At 9am on Monday, a Scania lorry with Polish numberplates loaded with 25 tonnes of steel tubes arrived in Berlin from an Italian manufacturer in Turin. It parked at the site of the German trading company ThyssenKrupp Schulte, a few kilometres from the Christmas market on Breitscheidplatz, a square in the heart of west Berlin.
The Polish driver of the lorry, Lukasz Urban, 37, spoke to its owner, his cousin Ariel Zurawski, by phone at about midday. Mr Urban was due to deliver the steel as he arrived but unloading was delayed for a day. At 3pm, he spoke to his wife. That was the last known contact with him.
At 3.45pm the lorry’s GPS data showed that it was moved backwards and forwards several times. It looked as if someone had practised driving the vehicle, Mr Zurawski said. Another driver, speaking outside the steel company where Mr Urban was delivering his load, told The Times that he believed the Pole had been taking a nap in his lorry when he was attacked.
The engine was started twice more, at 4.52pm and again 45 minutes later. Finally, at 7.34pm it was fired up again. Minutes later it approached Breitscheidplatz from the west, driving down Kantstrasse. Unconfirmed witness accounts said its headlights were off. Mr Urban, who by that time was dead from one or more gunshot wounds, was in the passenger seat.
At 8.02pm the lorry veered off the street and drove through a decorated pedestrian entrance into the crowded market. After a few metres it turned left through an alley formed by wooden market stalls that were selling mulled wine, fried sausages and Christmas ornaments. Reports said that it went through the market at about 40mph.
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Mowing down dozens of people, killing 11 and injuring at least 48, the lorry ended its journey by smashing through a stall, then a fence, and finally knocking over a Christmas tree. It came to a stop, its windscreen shattered. A witness reported seeing a masked man climb out and run off.
Almost two hours later Thomas Neuendorf, the Berlin police spokesman, spoke at the scene with relief on his face: the suspected driver had been arrested and was being questioned. The police had received a description of the driver who had fled. We have the situation under control, Michael Müller, the Berlin mayor, told reporters on Monday night. He spoke too soon.
Strict privacy laws prevented naming of suspect
German police and the media are very cautious about naming suspects and only provide the first name and the capital letter of the second name in most criminal cases.
The practice is dictated by Germany's strict privacy and data protection laws introduced in response to Nazi-era abuses of legal procedures.
German lawyers would argue that the system was vindicated by yesterday’s release of the main suspect in the attack in Berlin.
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The Pakistani refugee, named only as Naved B by the German media and unnamed by police and prosecutors, was arrested shortly after the attack but was found to be innocent after a day of questioning and forensic tests.
Under German law, privacy protection dictates that no one can be named until found guilty. The law does not apply to anyone who is already famous. Young offenders are not named even after they have been convicted to avoid thwarting their re-entry into society.
After the Germanwings disaster in 2015, in which a German pilot flew an airliner into the French Alps, it was the foreign media that first named him as Andreas Lubitz. Some German papers still call him Andreas L.
