A van ramming and stabbing near Berlin’s Pride festival that left one person dead and many others injured is believed to have been an Islamic extremist terror attack, Germany’s interior minister said Sunday. The suspect in Saturday night’s attack remains at large. Authorities issued a wanted notice and warned people against “direct contact” with Abdul Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, saying that he may be armed and dangerous. Authorities said he is believed to have injured several people after he drove a van into a crowd at a park near the Pride festival’s closing party. He then allegedly attacked other people with a weapon, suspected to be a machete. “Everything we see here points to us dealing with an Islamic terror attack,” Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said. Dobrindt put the total number of injured at 29, per the AP.
Dobrindt said the suspect had come to authorities’ attention in the past because of numerous previous crimes, of which he didn’t give details, and also because of “radicalization and belonging to the Islamist scene.” He said that he had been given a suspended sentence of 1 year and 10 months. He said Ballout was born in Germany, and that his mother was naturalized in 2002—three years before he was born. Police conducted operations in the city as they searched for the suspect. Those included a search at an apartment in Berlin’s Schöneberg district early Sunday, but police found no one there.
According to police, a white van drove into the Tiergarten park around 10pm and hit several people before colliding with a tree. The closing party at the Pride festival was ongoing at the time next to the Brandenburg Gate, a short distance away. Police said a woman was killed. Berlin’s fire service said that three people sustained life-threatening injuries and another eight were seriously injured. Earlier Saturday, “Berlin celebrated a great day. Berlin was colorful. Berlin showed how diverse, how open this city is. It showed once again that Berlin is the city of freedom,” Mayor Kai Wegner said on Sunday. “After 10 p.m., it got dark. Very dark.”
One of the presenters at the Pride party, Ricarda Hofmann, wrote in an Instagram post that she had been there “as part of a community that comes together to be visible. To celebrate love. To stand up for each other.” She said the attack left her speechless. “What happened today has changed something in me,” she wrote. Hundreds of thousands of people had come to Berlin to celebrate on Saturday, though it’s unclear how many were still at the festival by late evening. It’s one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ celebrations.