Italian police have searched three houses in and around Rome where the man suspected of killing 12 people in Berlin in an attack 10 days ago may have stayed in 2015, a judicial source says.
Anis Amri, a Tunisian, first arrived in Europe by boat to the Italian island of Lampedusa in 2011, and was shot dead by police in Milan four days after the December 19 attack in Berlin.
The searches on Thursday focused on places he was thought to have stayed after leaving a detention centre in Sicily in 2015, the source said.
Police are investigating whether he was seeking shelter in Italy or trying to reach another country.
Italy tried to deport him to Tunisia in 2015 after he completed a four-year jail term for attempting to set fire to a building, but Tunisian authorities refused to take him, so he was released from the centre after 60 days.
Italian anti-mafia and anti-terrorism chief Franco Roberti warned in an interview on Thursday that would-be militants needed the help of small-scale criminal networks such as those in Italy and Spain, partly to help provide false documents.
"From this point of view, Italy and Spain are the cradle," Roberti told La Repubblica newspaper.
He added that Amri had been radicalised in jail in Italy. "Five years ago he was not a jihadist ... In desperation, in isolation, in alienation, he found the convictions to follow the path of radicalisation."
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