Police officers stand in front of the "Fussilet 33" mosque in Berlin on February 28, 2017. (AFP PHOTO / dpa / Gregor Fischer)
BERLIN — German police launched pre-dawn raids Tuesday on a Berlin mosque frequented by Tunisian Christmas market attack suspect Anis Amri and on 23 other locations, authorities said.
A total of 460 police also swooped on apartments, two businesses and six cells in two prisons in the German capital, to gather evidence against radical Islamists. No arrests were reported.
Authorities said the mosque or Islamic prayer rooms known as Fussilet 33 had been formally banned, in line with a February 15 court order, about a week after it had preemptively shut its doors.
Security service had often named the mosque space located in an apartment as the Islamic State group’s mosque in Berlin, accused of recruiting radical Islamists and collecting funds for jihadists in Syria.
A note reading “The mosque is permanently closed” is pictured on a door of the “Fussilet 33” mosque in Berlin on February 28, 2017. (AFP PHOTO / dpa / Gregor Fischer)
The Berlin city-state’s interior minister, Andreas Geisel, in charge of security affairs, said the Fussilet association had recently ended its rental contract for the space.
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Police working next to the truck, center, that crashed into a Christmas market at Gedächniskirche church in Berlin, on December 19, 2016 killing at least twelve people and injuring at least 48. (AFP Photo/John MacDougall)
Amri had been there several times before he hijacked a truck on December 19, killed its Polish driver and plowed the vehicle through a Christmas market in an IS-claimed attack that took 11 more lives.
An Israeli woman was among those killed and her husband was seriously injured in the attack.
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