Berlin market attack suspect killed in shootout in Italy: Security source

This combination of pictures created on December 22, 2016 shows handout portraits released by German Federal Police Office (BKA) on December 21, 2016 showing two pictures of Tunisian man identified as Anis Amri, a rejected asylum seeker suspected of involvement in a deadly truck assault on a Berlin Christmas market claimed by the Islamic State jihadist group (top) and (bottom) computer screen grabs showing his portraits taken from a copy of his arrest warrant. Pic/AFP

Berlin: A man believed to be the suspect in the Berlin Christmas market truck attack was killed in a shoot-out in a suburb of the northern Italian city of Milan on Friday, a security source told Reuters.

Italy's interior minister was to hold a news conference at 10.45 a.m. (0945 GMT), the ministry said. A short video posted on the website of Italian magazine Panorama suggested the shooting happened before dawn, with police gathered around a cordoned-off area in the dark. The report was one of several conflicting accounts on the whereabouts of the 24-year-old Tunisian Anis Amri.

A man matching his description was seen in Aalborg in northern Denmark, the Danish police tweeted on Friday, saying people should keep away from the area as it had an ongoing operation there. Amri was also was caught on camera by police on a regular stake-out at a mosque in Berlin's Moabit district early on Tuesday a few hours after the attack, Germany's rbb public broadcaster reported. Amri was not a suspect at that time, and on Thursday morning, when police raided the mosque, they could not find him, rbb said.

German investigators had said they believed Amri was still lying low in Berlin because he is probably wounded and would not want to attract attention, Der Tagesspiegel, reported citing security sources. In the early hours of Friday morning, special forces arrested two men suspected of planning an attack on a shopping mall in the city of OberhausenIn in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, police said in a statement.

The men - two brothers from Kosovo, aged 28 and 31 - were arrested in the city of Duisburg on information from security sources, they said. A police spokesman said there was no connection between the Duisburg arrests and the Amri case, which has been claimed by Islamic State. Amri had been identified by security agencies as a potential threat and had had his application for asylum rejected, but authorities had not managed to deport him because of missing identity documents.