A decade after the deadliest jihadist attack in Germany's history, a new six-part TV series examines the institutional failures that allowed a terrorist to drive a hijacked truck into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin. "Blindspot Berlin" had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, following the year-long police investigation that failed to stop Anis Amri, a Tunisian whose asylum applications had been rejected and who was already known to German security services.
On December 19, 2016, Amri drove the truck into the Breitscheidplatz Christmas market, killing 12 people, including Polish driver Lukasz Urban, whom Amri shot before seizing his vehicle. Dozens more were injured; a 13th victim died of their injuries in 2021. Amri fled across Europe before being shot dead by Italian police near Milan four days later during a routine identity check. "What happened behind the scenes of that attack is in many ways just as disturbing," says director David Nawrath. "[It's] a picture of overwhelmed institutions, systemic failure and a staggering blindness to the threat that was developing right in front of our eyes."
Set in the year before the attack, the series follows police investigator Frank Laudin (Albrecht Schuch) and Isra Al-Husseini (Bayan Layla), a young officer and Arabic-language translator, as they try to infiltrate the Salafist network around Abu Walaa, the Iraqi preacher based in Hildesheim who recruited for the so-called "Islamic State" (IS). Frank recruits Murat (Tamer Trasoglu), who risks his life as an undercover informant. Inside the network, they find Amri: volatile and getting more dangerous. But despite repeated warnings, their bosses refuse to take the threat seriously, dismissing Amri as a possible terrorist in part because he was also a drug dealer, something the authorities saw as incompatible with being a radical Islamist.
The writers and production team closely based "Blindspot Berlin" on the facts of the Amri case and the years-long parliamentary investigation into the institutional failures that made the attack possible. The main characters are fictionalized, but the events play out as they did in real life. "We tried to keep as close as possible to what is known about the attack and what led to it," producer Simon Amberger told DW. "There is still a lot that isn't known, that is speculation. There we tried to leave things open." The parliamentary inquiry committee found that the criminal division investigating Amri was grossly understaffed, that judicial and security agencies failed to coordinate information exchange, and that officials made serious errors of judgment. Amri's asylum claims were rejected, but he was never deported. At one point the bureaucracy tipped into farce: Amri tried to leave Germany to rejoin his family and was stopped at the border, where police confiscated his passport on the grounds that he lacked the correct papers to go.
The producers knew from the start that the story reached beyond Germany. The Breitscheidplatz attack came at the end of a run of assaults across Europe: the Bataclan and coordinated shootings in Paris in 2015, the suicide bombings at Brussels airport and Maelbeek metro station, and a similar truck attack in Nice in 2016. Despite the lessons learned in the past decade, threat levels remain high. On July 25, 2025, a man drove a van into crowds at Christopher Street Day gay pride celebrations in Berlin, killing one and injuring dozens. The Breitscheidplatz attack also continues to resonate today, raising questions on "how far a free democratic society is willing to go, how much of its freedom it is willing to sacrifice for security," says Amberger.
He is aware, however, that a story of Islamic extremism and the failure of the German state to protect its citizens lands differently now, in the wake of recent elections that have seen a surge of support for the anti-immigrant, Islamophobic far-right AfD party. "There is a danger that this story, this series, could be misused to support a simplistic, populist political agenda," Amberger admits. "But it isn't that simple. [In the series] we show how extremism arises in marginalized groups that feel isolated, unseen and powerless. The solution isn't 'stop immigration.'" "Blindspot Berlin" premieres in Germany on public broadcaster ARD in October; its international distribution is also being planned.
Source: www.dw.com