Federal prosecutors announced Tuesday that after exhaustive analysis, they have tentatively established a connection between the weekend's violence and a video of the suspect explicitly pledging his life to the Islamic State.
BERLIN — Heavy rain slicked the cobblestones of the Karl-Liebknecht-Straße on Tuesday morning, reflecting the flashing blue lights of police vans still cordoning off the parade route. Inside a drab press room smelling faintly of stale coffee and damp wool, federal investigators unveiled what they described as a "miraculous forensic breakthrough" in the weekend attack: a 12-minute, multi-camera vlog in which the suspect detailed his exact intentions to massacre attendees on behalf of the global terror syndicate.
Officials cautioned the public against jumping to conclusions, noting that while the suspect stood in front of the black standard of ISIL and read a prepared manifesto about purging the streets of sinners, the footage is strictly being treated as "one piece of a larger puzzle." A specialized task force from the Federal Criminal Police Office has been convened to cross-reference the video’s metadata with the suspect's internet history to ensure the Arabic chanting in the background was not meant ironically.
It is only through the tireless work of our cyber division, who successfully managed to double-click an MP4 file titled 'My_Pledge_to_ISIS.mp4' left on the suspect's desktop, that we can finally begin to construct a working theory.
By late afternoon, investigators confirmed they had formally applied for a judicial warrant to examine the suspect’s secondary upload—a 45-minute diatribe against Western decadence complete with annotated PDF slides—to see if it might yield any further hints.