{"id":61570,"date":"2026-07-26T15:34:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-26T15:34:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/61570\/"},"modified":"2026-07-26T15:34:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-26T15:34:13","slug":"german-police-hunt-suspect-in-attack-near-berlin-pride-that-left-1-person-dead-and-29-hurt-world-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/61570\/","title":{"rendered":"German police hunt suspect in attack near Berlin Pride that left 1 person dead and 29 hurt | World News"},"content":{"rendered":"

BERLIN (AP) \u2014 German investigators on Sunday hunted a man who allegedly drove a van into a crowd near Berlin\u2019s Pride festival<\/a>, killing one person and wounding many more, before apparently stabbing others with a machete in what authorities believe was an Islamic extremist terror attack<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Authorities issued a wanted notice and warned people against approaching Abdul Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, saying that he may be armed and dangerous.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything we see here points to us dealing with an Islamic terror attack,\u201d Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said.<\/p>\n

Dobrindt put the total number of wounded at 29. The attack occurred a few hundred meters (yards) from a party near the Brandenburg Gate that was supposed to officially close out the city’s Pride festival.<\/p>\n

Ashley Jump, a 26-year-old U.K. resident, had traveled to Berlin for Saturday\u2019s Pride parade but had left the celebrations before the attack. They returned Sunday to leave flowers at a memorial near the crime scene in support of the LGBTQ+ community.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019ll never erase us, we\u2019ll never be gone,\u201d they said. \u201cAs long as humanity has existed, we\u2019ve existed. And as long as humanity exists, we will exist. We will not be removed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Suspect allegedly has ties to Islamic extremism<\/p>\n

Dobrindt said the suspect had come to authorities\u2019 attention in the past because of numerous previous crimes, of which he didn\u2019t give details, and also because of \u201cradicalization and belonging to the Islamist scene\u201d in the German capital.<\/p>\n

He said Ballout was born in Germany, and that his mother was naturalized in 2002 \u2014 three years before he was born.<\/p>\n

Dobrindt said the suspect had been convicted in Berlin in the past, though he didn\u2019t specify for what. He said that he had been given a suspended sentence of 1 year and 10 months.<\/p>\n

Police conducted operations in the city as they searched for the suspect. Those included a search at an apartment in Berlin’s Sch\u00f6neberg district in the early hours of Sunday, but police said they found no one there.<\/p>\n

Berlin’s Pride festival is one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ celebrations<\/p>\n

According to police, a white van drove into the Tiergarten park around 10 p.m. and hit several people before colliding with a tree. The closing party at the Pride festival<\/a>, known as Christopher Street Day<\/a>, was ongoing at the time next to the Brandenburg Gate, a short distance away. The party followed a parade with some 80 trucks that had made its way through downtown Berlin earlier in the day.<\/p>\n

The attack did not occur at the festival, along its route or at the closing party. Rather, the violence took place a few hundred meters (yards) away on a track in the Tiergarten park. The van drove into a crowd that was likely a mix of festivalgoers and other locals or visitors.<\/p>\n

Police said a woman was killed. Berlin\u2019s fire service said that three people sustained life-threatening injuries and another eight were seriously injured.<\/p>\n

The Pride event next to the Brandenburg Gate was called off around 10:15 p.m. and a band\u2019s performance on stage was interrupted. People were urged to go home and to avoid taking the route through the park.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of thousands of people had come to Berlin to celebrate on Saturday, though it\u2019s unclear how many were still at the festival by late evening. It\u2019s one of Europe\u2019s largest LGBTQ+<\/a> celebrations.<\/p>\n

The van, with its battered front resting against a tree, could still be seen at the scene Sunday morning.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are simply stunned by what happened,\u201d said Andre Lehmann, a top official with the main national LGBTQ+ association, LSVD+. \u201cThis suspected attack hits the heart of the queer community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amsterdam says it will celebrate freedom in the wake of Berlin attack<\/p>\n

Chancellor Friedrich Merz vowed that law enforcement would find the suspect.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would like to say this to Christopher Street Day participants here in Berlin but also across Germany: Don\u2019t let yourselves, let us not let ourselves, be intimidated,” he said. “These acts have only one purpose: They aim to divide our society. They want to take away from us the most important thing we have: Namely our openness and our freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dobrindt said he expected security measures at other major events in Germany, including Pride events elsewhere, to be reviewed and if necessary significantly strengthened.<\/p>\n

He pointed to concern about possible copycat crimes, adding that \u201cthis is not typical of such situations, but it also can\u2019t be ruled out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Berlin has seen Islamic extremist attacks before. In December, 2016, a rejected asylum seeker from Tunisia plowed a hijacked truck into a Christmas market<\/a>, killing 13 people and injuring dozens. He was killed days later in a shootout in Italy.<\/p>\n

In February last year, a Spanish tourist was stabbed and seriously wounded at Berlin\u2019s Holocaust Memorial. A Syrian man was convicted<\/a> in March and sentenced to 13 years in prison.<\/p>\n

Saturday’s violence \u201cis suspected to be an Islamist terror attack on our way of living together, on our liberal democracy, on our openness and our freedom,\u201d Wegner said.<\/p>\n

In the neighboring Netherlands, Amsterdam is hosting World Pride this week and next alongside its own annual Pride celebrations. Mayor Femke Halsema said authorities and organizers \u201care closely monitoring the security situation\u201d after the Berlin attack but aim to prevent any extra measures getting in the way of celebrating freedom and love.<\/p>\n

Associated Press reporters Kirsten Grieshaber, Fanny Brodersen, Pietro De Cristofaro and Stefanie Dazio in Berlin, and Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands, contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BERLIN (AP) \u2014 German investigators on Sunday hunted a man who allegedly drove a van into a crowd…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61571,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[19,18,23,47468,122,47400,2353,125,941,1491,47467,58,1493,46],"class_list":["post-61570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-berlin","tag-assault","tag-berlin","tag-crime","tag-fairs-and-festivals","tag-general-news","tag-germany-berlin-lgbtq-pride-parade-van-ramming","tag-islam","tag-law-enforcement","tag-lgbtq","tag-political-violence","tag-radicalism","tag-terrorism","tag-violence","tag-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61570\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}