There are probably seven or eight facts over the Berlin terror act of last night.
The driver of the vehicle is Pakistani....having come in Feb of 2016...the last of the big wave. He's used at least two different names and it seems that the authorities aren't that sure about who he really is. His associate? Dead.
The truck? Polish-plated, and was driven by a polish delivery guy up until 4PM. Polish guy had a chat with his wife. No contact after that point. He was found dead in the truck.
Twelve dead at this point, and around fifty injured.
Around 9:30, commercial German TV broke and started telling the story....using the word "terrorism" in about every four sentence. After ten minutes of viewing that.....I flipped the channel to public-run ARD. Oddly, ten seconds into this episode....the news guy used "unfall" (German word for accident) rather than using the word terror or terrorism. Over a 45-minute period, they tried awful hard to avoid the word terror.
Lots of Berlin-regional political figures did interviews....local gov't folks trying to calm the residents of the city.
As for the market? I would suspect that it won't reopen. Other Christmas markets will evaluate security and I suspect that more barriers will be put up today. Long-term? No fest will be able to operate unless barriers are in place.
So you stand back and assess all of this. You can talk all you want about dark-net, guns on the street, and more cops.....but as proven in this case, you just need a tractor-trailer rig and enough speed to plow through a crowd. I suspect if they drug-tested the Pakistani guy, he will show something in his system. I don't think the cops or prosecutor cares about that line of thought.
Zurich? No connection to this but someone walked into a Islam center yesterday afternoon and shot three members who were in the center (all in mid-30s). All three still alive at this point. Shooter? Just walked away. Cops hunting the guy but no idea who he is. Might be just angry Swiss guy.....might be someone with a grudge against this particular group of Islamic guys.
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