BERLIN\u00a0\u2014\u00a0The suspect in the deadly Berlin Pride attack that left one person dead and 29 injured was shot and killed by police during a confrontation Sunday in a suburb of the capital, authorities said.<\/p>\n
Abdul Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, was killed following a search that lasted nearly 24 hours after the attack in downtown Berlin. Berlin prosecutors said Ballout had previously sought to join the militant Islamic State group.<\/p>\n
Ballout was suspected of driving a van into a crowd near Berlin\u2019s Pride festival Saturday night before apparently stabbing others with a machete in what authorities believe was an Islamic extremist terror attack.<\/p>\n
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the attack occurred a few hundred yards from a party near the Brandenburg Gate that was supposed to close out the city\u2019s Pride festival.<\/p>\n
Ballout was tracked down around 6 p.m. Sunday at a garden in Spandau, a Berlin suburb, the city\u2019s police department wrote on X. It said he apparently ran toward officers with a sharp instrument, and police fired at least one shot. He died at the scene.<\/p>\n
Ballout was born in Germany, Dobrindt said. His mother was naturalized in 2002, three years before he was born.<\/p>\n
Ballout traveled to Lebanon in 2025 with the goal of going to Syria to join the Islamic State group, Berlin prosecutors said Sunday.<\/p>\n
There, he made contact with several people who were presumed members of the militant group \u2014 or at least he believed them to be, prosecutors said. He was arrested in Lebanon last year and sentenced by a military court to three months\u2019 imprisonment for offenses including incitement to religious and sectarian conflict.<\/p>\n
He returned to Germany after completing his sentence, where he was arrested at the Berlin airport.<\/p>\n
In May, a juvenile court in Berlin convicted Ballout of preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state, as well as publishing Islamic State propaganda on his Instagram account and other charges, prosecutors said.<\/p>\n
The court handed down a suspended sentence of 1 year and 10 months in youth custody, which Berlin prosecutors had appealed.<\/p>\n
The court said it took Ballout\u2019s months of pretrial detention in Germany and Lebanon into account. It also said it considered that Ballout had confessed to the crimes, appeared to distance himself from the militant group and no actual threat had ever materialized.<\/p>\n
He was released from detention pending the appeal.<\/p>\n
According to police, a white van drove into Berlin\u2019s Tiergarten park around 10 p.m. Saturday and hit several people before colliding with a tree. The closing party at the Pride festival, known as Christopher Street Day, 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 occurred a few hundred yards away from the festival events on a track in the Tiergarten park. The van drove into a crowd that was probably a mix of festivalgoers and others. <\/p>\n
Police said a woman was killed. <\/p>\n
On Sunday afternoon, hundreds of mourners gathered at a memorial at the landmark gate. They hugged one another and laid down flowers, candles, rainbow flags and homemade signs, including a cardboard one that said: \u201cThe only thing more powerful than hate is love.\u201d <\/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 the memorial.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019ll never erase us, we\u2019ll never be gone,\u201d Jump 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
Hundreds of thousands had come to Berlin to celebrate Saturday, though it\u2019s unclear how many were still at the festival by late evening. It\u2019s one of Europe\u2019s largest LGBTQ+ celebrations.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are simply stunned by what happened,\u201d said Andre Lehmann, a top official with LSVD+, the main national LGBTQ+ association. \u201cThis suspected attack hits the heart of the queer community.\u201d<\/p>\n
Government response<\/p>\n
Chancellor Friedrich Merz urged the nation to remain united in the aftermath of the attack.<\/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,\u201d Merz said. \u201cThese 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 strengthened.<\/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, 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 in March and sentenced to 13 years in prison.<\/p>\n
This week, Amsterdam will be hosting World Pride 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
Moulson, Grieshaber and Dazio write for the Associated Press. AP writers Fanny Brodersen and Pietro De Cristofaro in Berlin and Mike Corder in The Hague contributed to this report. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BERLIN\u00a0\u2014\u00a0The suspect in the deadly Berlin Pride attack that left one person dead and 29 injured was shot…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61657,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4778,8903,18,10160,5,22358,4427,742,25,47495,23590,80,27150,36865,22488,913],"class_list":["post-61656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-attack","tag-authority","tag-berlin","tag-dobrindt","tag-germany","tag-other","tag-party","tag-people","tag-police","tag-pride-festival","tag-saturday","tag-sunday","tag-suspect","tag-tiergarten-park","tag-van","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61656","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=61656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61656\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}