London: The Pakistani man wrongly arrested for the Berlin truck attack yesterday said he had told German police he could not even drive and was now afraid for the safety of his family back home.
Naveed Baloch, an asylum seeker from the troubled province of Balochistan, told the Guardian newspaper he had just left a friend's house and was crossing a street when he saw a police car approaching fast and picked up his pace.
He said he was arrested and taken to a police station, where he was undressed and photographed. "When I resisted, they started slapping me," the 24-year-old, who has been living in a secret location provided by police since his release because he says he is afraid for his life, told the British daily.
Baloch, who sought refuge in Germany as a member of a secular separatist movement in Balochistan, said he struggled to communicate because no translator could be found who could speak his native Balochi.
"I calmly told them I cannot drive at all. Neither can I even start a vehicle," he said.
Baloch, a shepherd by profession, said members of his family in the village of Mand in Balochistan in southwest Pakistan had received threatening phone calls following his arrest.
"Now they all know I fled to Germany, fearful of my life, and that I am claiming asylum here. It leaves my family very vulnerable and there's nothing I can do to protect them," he told the Guardian.
Baloch said he left Pakistan around a year ago, arriving in Germany via Iran, Turkey and Greece, because of death threats he had received for his activism for the Baloch National Movement.
Attacker 'considered going to Rome'
Suspected Berlin truck attacker Anis Amri considered heading to Rome before finally plumping for Milan where police shot him dead, Italian media reported yesterday.
The Corriere della Sera daily said that security cameras at Turin station had twice recorded the 24-year-old searching for trains either to Rome or Milan. "In the end, he chose a regional train for Lombardy because at that late hour, there was no train going to the capital," said the paper, adding that this showed he had "no precise travel plan."
Several papers also reported that when he arrived in Milan in the early hours of December 23, Amri asked a passer-by where he could catch a train or bus for "Rome, Naples or the south."
Sesto San Giovanni, the town north of Milan where Amri was eventually shot, is the starting point for international coaches to Spain, Morocco, Albania or southern Italy.
