Berlin Pride attack suspect killed in confrontation with police, officials say

The suspect in the deadly Berlin Pride attack that left one person dead and 29 injured was shot and killed by police during a confrontation on Sunday in a suburb of Germany’s capital city, authorities said.

Abdul Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, was killed following a search that lasted nearly 24 hours after the attack in downtown Berlin. Prosecutors said the suspect had previously sought to join the militant group ISIS.

Ballout, 21, was suspected of driving a van into a crowd near Berlin’s annual Pride festival Saturday night before apparently stabbing others with a machete in what authorities believe was an Islamist extremist terror attack.

“Everything we see here points to us dealing with an Islamic terror attack,” German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said.

Dobrindt put the total number of injured at 29. The attack occurred a few hundred metres from a party near the Brandenburg Gate that was supposed to officially close out the city’s Pride festival.

Ballout was born in Germany, the minister said. His mother was naturalized in 2002, three years before he was born.

Ashley Jump, a 26-year-old British resident, had travelled to Berlin for Saturday’s 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 2SLGBTQ+ community.

“They’ll never erase us; we’ll never be gone,” they said. “As long as humanity has existed, we’ve existed. And as long as humanity exists, we will exist. We will not be removed.”

Previous conviction

Ballout travelled to Lebanon in 2025 with the goal of going to Syria to join ISIS, 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 in prison for offences including incitement to religious and sectarian conflict.

Ballout 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 ISIS propaganda on his Instagram account, among other charges, prosecutors said.

The court handed down a suspended sentence of one year and 10 months in youth custody, which Berlin prosecutors have appealed.

• Berlin Pride attack prompts grief, worry and solidarity with 2SLGBTQ+ community

The court said it took Ballout’s 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.

He was released from detention pending the appeal.

‘Hits the heart of the queer community’

According to police, a white van drove into Tiergarten park at about 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 metres away on a track in Tiergarten park. The van drove into a crowd that was likely a mix of festivalgoers and other locals or visitors, leaving a woman dead.

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 2SLGBTQ+ celebrations.

“We are simply stunned by what happened,” said Andre Lehmann, a top official with the main national association, LSVD+. “This suspected attack hits the heart of the queer community.”

Dobrindt, Germany’s interior minister, said he expected security measures at other major events in the country, including Pride events elsewhere, to be reviewed and significantly strengthened if necessary.

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 in prison.

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.

— The Associated Press