“Berlin market attack possibly CIA false-flag operation”

On Monday, a truck crashed into a crowded market in Berlin, killing at least 12 people and wounding dozens of others. Police detained a 23-year-old suspect, Navid B., a Pakistani asylum seeker. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has described the Berlin Christmas market attack as a terrorist act. The interior minister of the German state of Saarland has said that Germany is in a state of war.

Stephen Lendman, author and journalist from Chicago, told Press TV’s Top 5 that the attack in a Berlin Christmas market may be a state-sponsored “false-flag” operation to push Germany to play a more active role in the so-called war on terror in the Middle East region.

The journalist opined that “very possibly dirty CIA hands were involved in what happened in Berlin.”

“Germany is a very important US ally and an attack like this could have been staged to get Germany aroused about … terrorism to [keep] Germany on board of America’s imperial agenda in the Middle East,” Lendman said on Tuesday.

The European country has been “part of America’s imperial wars allied with the rogue regional states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel and the other [Persian] Gulf states,” he noted.

According to Lendman, “The timing [of the incident] coincides with the liberation of Aleppo, with the assassination of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey and with the Electoral College in America confirming [US President-elect Donald] Trump’s election as America’s 45th president.”

The Berlin attack came less than a month after the US State Department called for caution in markets and other public places across Europe on the holiday season.

Germany has been spared acts of terror claimed by Daesh such as the 2015 attacks in Paris, but the Takfiri group has claimed two assaults carried out by refugees in Germany. An axe rampage on a train in Wuerzburg in July injured five people, and a bomb attack in Ansbach left 15 people injured.