On 19 December 2016, a jihadist deliberately smashed a stolen truck into pedestrians at a Christmas market next to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, leaving 12 people dead and 56 others injured.
The truck was eventually stopped by its automatic brakes. The jihadist, Anis Amri, was a Tunisian failed asylum seeker.
As reported in the German Bild newspaper, Mohamed Matar of the Neukölln Meeting Center (NBS) read from the Quran at the “inter-religious devotion” in the Gedächtniskirche. The Berlin intelligence agency has already placed the NBS under surveillance as belonging to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.
“It’s hard to understand that one of the representatives of a disputed mosque association, which is being monitored by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, was invited as a speaker to the memorial service,” said the director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), Deidre Berger.
“Anis Amri was influenced by an Islamist mosque association whose radical ideology encouraged him.”Berger said the disturbing background of the perpetrator should not be forgotten.
The NBS has denied the allegations. A spokesman said that Matar “rejects any form of terror and violence, no matter who it is.” Also, the NBS complained about being mentioned in the constitutional protection report.
The chairman of the NBS, Mohamed Taha Sabri, is regularly criticized for links with dubious persons however. Only recently he participated in events organised by the “Palestinian Community in Germany e.V.” (PGD). The PGD has been designated by the constitutional protection authority in Germany as a “terrorist group”.
Areport from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia called it the representation of a terror group in Germany.
In March 2016, according to constitutional protection, the first event of the “Fatwa Committee Germany” (FAD) took place in the NBS, where several theologians from the Muslim Brotherhood were present.