ByThePost

FRANKFURT, Germany – Explosives experts on Sunday defused a large World War II aerial bomb in the southern German city of Augsburg — clearing the way for thousands of evacuated residents to return to their Christmas celebrations at home. City police tweeted that they had "good news at Christmas" just before 7 p.m. local time (1 p.m. ET) Sunday. They had earlier been unable to say how long residents would have to stay away. Some 32,000 households with 54,000 residents in the city's historic central district were forced to leave by 10 a.m. Christmas morning so experts could handle the bomb. They had to clean seven decades of muck off the bomb so they could find and disable its three detonators. The munition's large size — 1.8 tons — suggested it was a so-called blockbuster of the type dropped by British forces, with the aim of blowing surrounding buildings apart so that accompanying incendiary bombs could start fires more easily. The bomb was uncovered last week during...

The fugitive suspected of driving a truck into a crowded Berlin Christmas market on Monday was on the radar of German authorities as far back as June, when they tried - and failed - to deport him after learning he was plotting a "serious act of violent subversion," a German official told The Washington Post. Further, security agencies exchanged info as recently as November that allegedly tied Anis Amri to Islamist militants, yet the Tunisian-born 24-year-old was able to evade terror investigators in the lead-up to Monday's ISIS-claimed massacre, which killed 12 and wounded 48. Authorities released two new images of Anis Amri, the suspect in Monday's attack in Berlin. (German police) Berlin prosecutors told The Associated Press in a statement Wednesday that they first launched an investigation against Amri on March 14 followed a tip from federal security agencies. The tip warned that Amri might be planning a break-in to finance the purchase of automatic weapons for ...

BERLIN – German investigators were searching Wednesday for the killer or killers in Monday's attack on a crowded Berlin Christmas market after a man arrested soon after the rampage was released for lack of evidence and the Islamic State group claimed responsibility. Police in Berlin said they had received 508 tips on the attack as of Tuesday night, but it wasn't clear whether prosecutors had any concrete leads. The attack on the market next to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in the center of the capital left 12 dead and 48 injured. Shortly afterward, a Pakistani man who had come to Germany as an asylum-seeker was detained based on a description from witnesses of a suspect who jumped from the truck and fled. However, the Pakistani man was freed Tuesday after prosecutors couldn't find evidence tying him to the attack. The claim of responsibility carried on IS's Amaq news agency on Tuesday described the man seen fleeing from the truck as "a soldier of the Isl...