BERLIN (AP) — Police shot and killed the suspect in the deadly attack near Berlin’s Pride festivities during a confrontation Sunday in a city suburb, authorities said. The violence left one person dead and 29 others injured.
Abdul Ballout, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, was found after an almost 24-hour manhunt that began following the attack in central Berlin. Prosecutors said Ballout had previously tried to join the militant Islamic State group.
Investigators believe Ballout drove a van into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride festival on Saturday night, then apparently attacked additional people with a machete. Authorities are treating the incident as an Islamic extremist terror attack.
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the attack took place just a few hundred yards from a party near the Brandenburg Gate, where celebrations were set to mark the end of the city’s Pride festival.
Berlin police said on X that officers located Ballout at about 6 p.m. Sunday in a garden in Spandau, a suburb of the capital. According to police, he appeared to run toward officers while carrying a sharp instrument, prompting them to fire at least one shot. He died at the scene.
Dobrindt said Ballout was born in Germany. His mother became a naturalized citizen in 2002, three years before his birth.
Ashley Jump, a 26-year-old resident of the U.K., had come to Berlin for Saturday’s Pride parade but left the celebrations before the attack unfolded. On Sunday, they returned to place flowers at a memorial near the scene in a show of solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community.
“They’ll never erase us, we’ll never be gone,” Jump said. “As long as humanity has existed, we’ve existed. And as long as humanity exists, we will exist. We will not be removed.”
Suspect convicted of ties to Islamic extremism
Ballout traveled to Lebanon in 2025 with the goal of going to Syria to join the Islamic State group, Berlin prosecutors said Sunday.
There, he made contact with several people who were presumed members of the militant group — 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’ imprisonment for offenses including incitement to religious and sectarian conflict.
He returned to Germany after completing his sentence, where he was arrested at the Berlin airport.
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.
The court handed down a suspended sentence of 1 year and 10 months in youth custody, which Berlin prosecutors had appealed.
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The court said it took Ballout’s months of pre-trial 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.
He was released from detention pending the appeal.
Berlin’s Pride festival is one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ celebrations
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, 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.
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.
Police said a woman was killed.
On Sunday afternoon, hundreds of mourners gathered at a memorial at the iconic gate. They hugged each other and laid down flowers, candles, rainbow flags and homemade signs, including a cardboard one that said: “the only thing more powerful than hate is love.”
Hundreds of thousands 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.
“We are simply stunned by what happened,” said Andre Lehmann, a top official with the main national LGBTQ+ association, LSVD+. “This suspected attack hits the heart of the queer community.”
Amsterdam says it will celebrate freedom in the wake of Berlin attack
Chancellor Friedrich Merz urged the nation to remain united in the aftermath of the attack.
“I would like to say this to Christopher Street Day participants here in Berlin but also across Germany: Don’t 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.”
Dobrindt said he expected security measures at other major events in Germany, including Pride events elsewhere, to be reviewed and if necessary significantly boosted.
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.
In February last year, a Spanish tourist was stabbed and seriously wounded at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, an attack that saw a Syrian man convicted in March and sentenced to 13 years.
This week, Amsterdam will be hosting World Pride alongside its own annual Pride celebrations. Mayor Femke Halsema said authorities and organizers “are closely monitoring the security situation” after the Berlin attack but aim to prevent any extra measures getting in the way of celebrating freedom and love.
