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Germany’s Schaeuble admits ‘mistakes’ in refugee policy

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany made mistakes with an open-door policy that saw more than a million migrants enter Germany over the past two years, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble acknowledged on Sunday, but he said Berlin was trying to learn from those missteps.

“We have tried to improve what got away from us in 2015,” Schaeuble told the newspaper Welt am Sonntag. “We politicians are human; we also make mistakes. But one can at least learn from them.”

Schaeuble is a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats, who have lost support to the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party over the migration issue, after several attacks carried out by migrants.

The AfD is now poised to become the third largest party in parliament in September national elections.

The issue has also divided the European Union, with many countries balking at taking in a proportional share of refugees.

Schaeuble said Europe needed to consider harmonising its social benefits to achieve a more equitable distribution of migrants among EU members, a subject that he said had thus far been considered “taboo” in Germany.

“We have much higher standards when it comes to social benefits than most European countries. That’s why so many want to come to Germany,” he told the newspaper.

Schaeuble also said he was skeptical about the leadership style of the U.S. President Donald Trump, who has sparked concerns among European leaders with executive orders on immigration, as well as his decision to cancel trade agreements.

“In America, we can now see how someone is acting as if he can do everything very quickly. That will not only have good results,” he said.

A poll conducted earlier this month showed that refugee policy would be the biggest issue for voters in the September election. [nL5N1EW1C1]

Merkel, who is seeking a fourth term in office, spoke by telephone on Saturday with Trump, who has described her August 2015 decision to keep Germany’s borders open to refugees, mostly from the Middle East, as a “catastrophic mistake.”

In September, after a defeat for her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in a Berlin state election, Merkel said she wished she could turn back the clock on the migrant crisis, although she stopped short of saying her policy was a mistake.

Merkel has rejected calls from the CDU’s Bavarian sister party to set an upper limit on migration, but is now pressing for more aggressive steps to send back migrants who are refused asylum, as well as action to prevent a similar flood of migrant from Africa.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal, editing by Larry King)

Dozens of survivors pay homage to victims of Auschwitz

Survivors walk in remains of Nazi German concentration camps

OSWIECIM, Poland (Reuters) – Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo and some of the last survivors of Auschwitz paid homage to the victims of the Holocaust on Friday, 72 years after the Nazi death camp was liberated in the final throes of World War Two.

At a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe, Szydlo told dozens of people gathered in the camp that the suffering of the victims was a “wound that … can never be healed and should never be forgotten”.

“No one can understand this suffering,” Szydlo said. “I want a message to go out again from this place today that what happened in this German camp was evil … An evil that can be overcome with good. Memory and truth are our responsibility, they are our weapons against evil.”

Nazi German occupation forces set up the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Oswiecim, around 70 km (45 miles) from Poland’s second city, Krakow.

Between 1940 and 1945, Auschwitz developed into a vast complex of barracks, workshops, gas chambers and crematoria.

More than a million people, mainly European Jews, were gassed, shot or hanged at the camp, or died of neglect, starvation or disease, before the Soviet Red Army entered its gates in early 1945 during its decisive advance on Berlin.

Szydlo’s conservative government worries that the world will forget that Auschwitz was a German camp, and has launched a campaign against any mention of “Polish death camps” in international media.

Of the six million Jews who died during the Holocaust, about half had been living in Poland.

(Reporting by Janusz Chmielewski; Writing by Justyna Pawlak; Editing by Lidia Kelly and Kevin Liffey)

German population hits record high of 82.8 million due to migrants

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany’s population grew by some 600,000 last year to reach a record high of 82.8 million people due to the number of migrants who have arrived in the country, the Federal Statistics office said on Friday.

In a preliminary estimate for 2016, the statistics office said the population had eclipsed the previous record high of 82.5 million recorded at the end of 2002, even though the number of deaths in 2016 exceeded the number of births by between 150,000 and 190,000.

Deaths have exceed births in Germany since 1972, with a total of more than 5 million fewer births than deaths.

However, countering that trend, more than a million people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and beyond flocked to Germany in 2015 and 2016, drawn by its strong economy, relatively liberal asylum laws and generous system of benefits.

Since the height of the euro zone debt crisis, Germany is also attracting many migrants from other European countries such as Greece and Spain.

The figures used to calculate net migration were based on numbers signing up at registration offices. Asylum seekers are initially housed in reception centers and generally only registered later.

Steady economic growth since 2010 and generous pro-family policies by successive governments in recent years have helped lift the birth rate but it is still below the death rate.

German government support for refugees has climbed in recent years. For 2016 and 2017 the government set aside 28.7 billion euros ($30.64 billion) in funding to accommodate and integrate the more than one million asylum seekers who entered the country, the ministry said.

(Reporting by Erik Kirschbaum)

Germany condemns Israel’s plans for more settlement homes on occupied land

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany, in unusually strong criticism of Israel, said on Wednesday plans to build 2,500 more settlement homes in the Israeli-occupied West Bank put in doubt Israel’s stated commitment to a two-state solution with the Palestinians.

Israel announced the plans on Tuesday in the second such declaration since U.S. President Donald Trump took office signaling he could be more accommodating toward such projects than his predecessor Barack Obama.

Martin Schaefer, a spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry, said the announcement went “beyond what we have seen on it in the last few months both in terms of its scale and its political significance”.

He said the German government doubted whether the Israeli government still stood by its official goal of a peace agreement under which Palestinians would get a state in territory now occupied by Israel and co-exist peacefully with it.

If Israel were to move away from this goal, the basis of the whole Middle East peace process would be thrown into question, Schaefer added. The last round of U.S.-brokered peace talks collapsed in 2014.

The European Union has also warned that Israel’s settlement plans threaten to undermine the chances of peace with the Palestinians.

Germany went to great lengths to make amends for the Nazi era genocide of Jews, including establishing strong relations with Israel, which now considers Germany to be among its most important European allies.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told parliament on Wednesday to expect more announcements on settlement-building and earlier this week told senior ministers that there were no more restrictions on construction.

“We can build where we want and as much as we want,” an official quoted Netanyahu as telling the ministers.

Most countries consider settlements illegal and an obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace, as they reduce and fragment the territory Palestinians need for a viable state.

Israel disagrees, citing biblical, historical and political connections to the land – which the Palestinians also assert – as well as security interests.

(Reporting by Andreas Rinke in Berlin and Ori Lewis in Jerusalem; writing by Michelle Martin; editing by Mark Heinrich)

Austrian teenager says he built ‘test bomb’ in Germany: minister

VIENNA (Reuters) – An Austrian teenager arrested on suspicion of planning an Islamist attack in Vienna has told investigators he built a “test bomb” in Germany, where another suspect has been arrested, Austria’s interior minister was quoted as saying on Tuesday.

The Austrian suspect, a 17-year-old with Albanian roots, was arrested on Friday after tip-offs from unspecified foreign countries. Austria alerted Germany to a related suspect, a 21-year-old who was arrested in the western city of Neuss on Saturday. A boy thought to be 12 has also been held in Austria.

Whether the German and Austrian suspects are believed to have planned separate attacks or a joint one, and of what nature, is not clear. Austria has said public places in Vienna including its underground transit system might have been a target.

“A test bomb seems to have been put together,” Austrian Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka told broadcaster ORF, even though no explosives were found in the apartment in question. “That is all we can announce today from the questioning.”

Asked what he meant by a test bomb, Sobotka said: “Where one tries to put together materials obtained on the market from instructions on the internet.” He added that what had been established in the questioning was changing daily.

An Interior Ministry spokesman declined to elaborate.

The German admitted during questioning that the Austrian had visited him for two weeks at the end of last year, a spokesman for the Duesseldorf prosecutor said on Monday.

Germany’s Focus magazine had said the man was planning a bomb attack on police and soldiers. Both he and the Austrian had experimented with materials to create explosives in the Neuss apartment, it said.

German authorities have been on high alert since a Tunisian whose bid for asylum had been rejected rammed a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin on Dec. 19, killing 12 people.

Police in Vienna have been put on heightened alert since Friday’s arrest and have increased patrols at transport hubs and busy public places.

(Reporting by Francois Murphy and Alexandra Schwarz-Goerlich; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Islamic State using online ‘headhunters’ to recruit young Germans

By Andrea Shalal

BERLIN (Reuters) – Islamic State is using “headhunters” on social media and instant messaging sites to recruit disaffected young people in Germany, some as young as 13 or 14, the head of the country’s domestic intelligence agency said on Thursday.

Hans-Georg Maassen also drew parallels between the militant Islamist group and past radical movements such as communism and Adolf Hitler’s Nationalist Socialists which also tried to lure young people keen to rebel against their parents and society.

“On social media networks there are practically headhunters who approach young people and get them interested in this (Islamist) ideology,” Maassen told foreign reporters in Berlin.

Maassen cited the case of a teenage German-Moroccan girl identified as Safia S., who is accused of stabbing a policeman at a train station in Hanover last February, and a 12-year-old German-Iraqi boy who tried to detonate two explosive devices in the western town of Ludwigshafen in December.

About 20 percent of an estimated 900 people from Germany who have been recruited by Islamic State to join the fight in Iraq and Syria are women, some as young as 13 or 14, he said.

German authorities are monitoring 548 Islamists deemed to be a security risk, but German law does not allow for their arrest until they have committed a crime, Maassen said.

He said he was satisfied that police and security officials had communicated well over the case of the failed Tunisian asylum seeker Anis Amri, who killed 12 people on Dec. 19 by ramming a truck through a Berlin Christmas market.

The case sparked criticism because German authorities had identified Amri, who was imprisoned in Italy for four years, as a security risk and had investigated him for various reasons, but he was never taken into custody.

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said on Wednesday the cases of all those deemed a security risk in the aftermath of the Berlin attack would be reviewed.

Maassen said European intelligence agencies were also seeing the radicalization of other segments of society through social media, with growing numbers of people who were not previously politically active attracted to far-right groups.

Such people had their views reinforced in so-called “echo chambers” on the Internet, Maassen said.

“We’ve seen this with Islamic State, but now we’re seeing this with so-called ‘good citizens’ who are being radicalized, and we worry that this radicalization could be transformed into a willingness to commit violent acts,” Maassen said.

Support for far-right groups has grown in Germany following the arrival of more than a million migrants and asylum seekers over the past two years, many of them young Muslim men fleeing conflicts in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Gareth Jones)

Berlin truck attacker used at least 14 names: German police

Anis Amri suspect of Berlin Christmas market attack

By Joseph Nasr and Matthias Inverardi

BERLIN/DUESSELDORF, Germany (Reuters) – The Tunisian man who killed 12 people last month by plowing a truck into a Berlin Christmas market had lived under at least 14 different names in Germany, a regional police chief said on Thursday, raising more questions about security lapses.

Anis Amri, shot dead by Italian police in Milan on Dec. 23, had been marked as a potential threat by authorities in the western federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW)in February 2016, some six months after he arrived in Germany and applied for asylum.

“He acted in a conspiratorial manner and used various personalities,” Dieter Schuermann, head of the NRW Criminal Police Unit, told the regional parliament during a briefing.

The 24-year-old divided his time between NRW and Berlin, where intelligence officials also classified him as a potential threat. But there was a consensus among security officials that he posed no concrete threat, Schuermann said.

An investigation into the attack is focusing on whether Amri had any accomplices.

Police arrested another Tunisian man in Berlin this week, who prosecutors say had dinner with Amri at an Arab restaurant in the capital one day before the attack on Dec. 19.

“INTENSIVE DISCUSSIONS”

A spokeswoman for the prosecution said on Wednesday that Amri and the arrested suspect, identified as 26-year-old Bilel A., had “very intensive discussions” at the restaurant on the eve of the attack.

The co-owner of the restaurant in north Berlin where the two allegedly met told Reuters on Thursday he had not been aware that Amri had dined at the premises until police came asking if they could have CCTV footage recorded on Dec. 18.

“No one who was here that night remembers seeing him,” said the co-owner, declining to give his name and requesting the eatery not be named.

“We are so busy we hardly have time to breathe. The police said he was here between 8 and 9 p.m.,” said the man, serving lunch as the restaurant began filling up.

At a shelter for migrants at the western end of Berlin where Bilel A. was arrested, refugees who said they knew Amri’s suspected accomplice said he had always told them he was Libyan.

“The strangest thing about him was that he used to pray every day but most evenings he would go out to nightclubs with his friends,” said Mohammad, a 21-year-old Syrian refugee who said he had shared a room at the shelter with Bilel A. six months ago before moving to another room at the facility.

(Editing by Ralph Boulton)

Germany detains Tunisian man linked to Berlin truck attacker

Police stand in front of the truck used in the Berlin Christmas Market Attack

BERLIN (Reuters) – German police have detained a 26-year-old Tunisian man over links with the perpetrator of an Islamist truck attack on a Berlin Christmas market that killed 12 people, a federal prosecutors’ spokeswoman said on Wednesday.

Police on Tuesday evening searched the living quarters of the man identified as Bilel A. after he was found to have had dinner with Anis Amri a day before Amri steered a truck through the market on Dec. 19, spokeswoman Frauke Koehler said.

“This contact person is a 26-year-old Tunisian. We are investigating him for possible participation in the attack,” she told reporters.

Amri, 24, also a Tunisian and failed asylum seeker, was killed in a shootout with Italian police on Dec. 23 after fleeing Germany and traveling through the Netherlands, Belgium and France. Islamic State militants claimed responsibility for the Berlin attack.

Koehler said the investigation had shown Amri met the second Tunisian man in a restaurant in central Berlin on the eve of the attack and that the two engaged in “very intense discussions”.

“That triggered the suspicion for us that the suspect, this 26-year-old Tunisian, was possibly involved in the act, or at the very least knew of the attack plans of Anis Amri,” she said.

Koehler said there was insufficient evidence at this point to charge the man with any role in the Christmas market carnage, though had been previously investigated on suspicion of planning a violent attack.

Officials were evaluating communications devices seized during the raid of the man’s accommodations in a Berlin refugee center, and in the course of a second raid the same evening at the flat of another man who had contact with Amri.

In a separate statement, the Berlin state prosecutor’s office said it had detained the 26-year-old Tunisian on Tuesday for suspected social benefit fraud in three German cities.

A spokesman for the Berlin prosecutor’s office said Bilel A. had used at least two aliases, Ahmad H. and Abu M., and also claimed to be Egyptian. He was believed to have arrived in Germany in 2014 or perhaps earlier.

Berlin prosecutors in 2015 investigated whether the man had acquired explosives for an attack but dropped the inquiry in June last year for lack of evidence.

Koehler said Amri stared into a surveillance camera at a subway station near the Berlin zoo shortly after the Christmas market attack, and raised his index finger in a gesture sometimes seen in Islamic State propaganda videos.

She said forensic evidence showed that the Polish driver from whom Amri hijacked the truck was fatally shot while sitting in the passenger seat of the vehicle. The gun Amri used was the one found next to his body by police in Milan, Italy, she added.

Belgian prosecutors said on Wednesday Amri made a two-hour stopover at the Brussels North station on Dec. 21 after entering Belgium on a train from Amsterdam, before heading onwards to France.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Michael Nienaber in Berlin, Alissa de Carbonnel in Brussels; editing by Mark Heinrich)

‘We need to talk’, Bavarian CSU tells Merkel on migrants

Bavarian state premier and leader of the Christian Social Union (CSU) Horst Seehofer attends a CSU party meeting at 'Kloster Seeon' in Seeon, southern Germany,

SEEON, Germany (Reuters) – Insisting “this is serious”, the leader of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Bavarian sister party stood by his demand for a refugee cap and said the conservative allies still have differences to resolve before campaigning for September’s election.

Horst Seehofer, the leader of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), said on Wednesday a “reconciliation summit” he is due to hold with Merkel in Munich in February was still planned but that the program was not finalized.

The CSU has long bristled at Merkel’s open-door policies that allowed into Germany about 1.1 million refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere since mid-2015. Ignoring her objections, it insists on a limit of 200,000 refugees per year.

By saying the two parties, who form the conservative “Union” bloc, still have differences to resolve, Seehofer kept up pressure on Merkel to toughen her stance on migrants.

“We still need to discuss some things and then we will go into the election together,” Seehofer said of his CSU and Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), speaking at the beginning of his party’s annual January retreat.

“This country is polarized and divided and it must be the task of all democrats to lead their country together,” he said.

The migrant issue has become more heated after an attack before Christmas in Berlin in which an asylum-seeker from Tunisia killed 12 people. After that, the CSU pushed for the Mediterranean Sea route for migrants to be closed by sending them back to Africa rather than allowing them to stay in Europe.

Merkel and Seehofer’s February meeting in Munich was planned after they each stayed away from the other’s party conference late last year as their conservative alliance struggles to repair the divisions over migrant policy.

Members of the CDU are concerned the divisions have not healed.

Ahead of the national election, the CSU is worried about losing votes to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party that takes a hard line against refugees.

Seehofer is also looking ahead to a regional election in Bavaria in 2018, worried about losing votes then too to the AfD, which punished Merkel’s CDU in other state votes last year.

Appealing to his Bavarian base, Seehofer rejected a proposal by Merkel’s interior minister for Germany’s state intelligence agencies be centralized. At the moment, each of the 16 federal states has its own.

(Reporting by Andreas Rinke and Paul Carrel in Berlin; Writing by Paul Carrel; Editing by Alison Williams)

Germany identified Berlin truck attacker as a threat last February

Handout pictures released on December 21, 2016 and acquired from the web site of the German Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) Federal Crime Office show suspect Anis Amri searched in relation with the Monday's truck attack on a Christmas market in Berlin.

BERLIN (Reuters) – German investigators identified the Tunisian man who killed 12 people in Berlin before Christmas as a threat in February last year but decided it was unlikely he would carry out an attack, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported.

Anis Amri, 24, plowed a truck through a Berlin Christmas market on Dec. 19. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, calling the assailant a “soldier” of the militant group.

The German authorities had determined Amri posed a threat after receiving intelligence showing that in early February he had been in contact with suspected members of Islamic State and offered himself as a suicide bomber, the Sueddeutsche reported.

Officials at the German Interior Ministry were not immediately available for comment.

Amri, whom Italian police shot dead in Milan on Dec. 23, had wanted to acquire weapons for an attack in Germany and sought accomplices, the Sueddeutsche said in a joint report with German broadcasters NDR and WDR, citing security documents.

However, German officials who subsequently met to decide whether to deport Amri, determined he posed no acute threat that could be presented in court.

Amri’s attack in Berlin has prompted German lawmakers to call for tougher security measures. In a New Year’s address to the nation, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Islamist terrorism is the biggest test facing Germany.

(Writing by Paul Carrel; editing by Richard Lough)

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