Chief suspect in deadly Berlin Pride attack shot dead by police
Authorities say the suspect, Abdul Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, had previously been known to the authorities for a “high number” of previous crimes and for being radicalised.
Police officers in the Tiergarten Park near the scene where a vehicle rammed into a crowd near the Pride March in Berlin on Sunday, Jul 26, 2026. (Photo: AP/Markus Schreiber)
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BERLIN: The chief suspect in a deadly attack near Berlin Pride was shot dead by police on Sunday evening (Jul 26), authorities said, after German police had spent the day hunting for the man in what they called a terror attack that left one woman dead and 29 others injured.
Berlin police said on X that officers located the suspect, previously named as 21-year-old Abdul Ballout, at around 6pm (12am, Monday, Singapore time). He “ran towards them with a bladed weapon”, prompting officers to open fire and kill him.
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt named the chief suspect as 21-year-old Abdul Ballout, whom German media reported was a supporter of the so-called Islamic State group (IS) with a criminal conviction dating from just this May.
The incident late on Saturday shattered what had been a day of celebration for hundreds of thousands attending Christopher Street Day (CSD), one of Europe’s largest Pride events.
HOW THE ATTACK UNFOLDED
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Shortly before 10pm on Saturday, a white vehicle ran into people on the southern edge of central Berlin’s Tiergarten park before crashing into a tree.
Dobrindt said Ballout was suspected of then using a machete to attack more people.
He said 29 people were hurt, some of them with life-threatening injuries.
Police had spent Sunday combing the ground near the car, a Citroen minivan with a Berlin number plate, for clues and taking samples of material from the scene, before locating and killing Ballout later that evening.
THE SUSPECT
Dobrindt said Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, had previously been known to the authorities for a “high number” of previous crimes and for being radicalised and that he belonged to the “Islamist scene”.
Dobrindt said that Ballout had a criminal conviction and been sentenced to a year and ten months in jail, but that the sentence had been suspended.
“Everything we see here indicates that this was an Islamist terror attack,” he said.
German media reported that the conviction for “preparing a serious act of subversive violence” dated from this May and followed a trip Ballout made last year to the Middle East in a failed attempt to join IS.
Police described Ballout as thin, around 1.9m tall with black hair and dressed in a black hoodie and white trousers.
An AFP reporter saw on Sunday that police had been deployed to the suspect’s alleged address, around 1km south of the scene of the attack.
Dobrindt had earlier said officers at train stations, airports and Germany’s borders had been alerted to be on the lookout for Ballout.
“WON’T BEAT US DOWN”
In a vigil on Sunday afternoon, hundreds of people packed out the square in front of the Brandenburg Gate holding rainbow flags and flowers, with more gathering on the Unter den Linden avenue next to the square.
Luka, a 23-year-old student, told AFP she hoped the attack wouldn’t be “instrumentalised” by the anti-immigration far-right.
At the scene of the attack itself, people left handwritten messages of condolence and support.
Armin Duenhoelter, 49, from Wolfsburg, who works as a drag artist, was backstage at the main stage when the celebrations were cut short.
He told AFP early Sunday that he was still “shocked” but vowed to be back for next year’s CSD “even though in the back of your mind or in your gut you might feel uneasy”.
“But we won’t let it beat us down,” he said.
Politicians in Germany and elsewhere in Europe widely condemned the attack, while the flag at the German Bundestag was ordered to be lowered to half-mast.
Before attending a memorial service for the victims in central Berlin’s Marienkirche, Chancellor Friedrich Merz appealed to those targeted by the attack to “not let yourselves be intimidated”.
“These people have only one aim – to divide our society,” he said.
SPATE OF ATTACKS
Saturday’s attack revived memories of a string of similar incidents which have shaken Germany in recent years and inflamed debate on immigration, with several of the perpetrators being from outside Germany.
Martin Hess, a lawmaker from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), said in a statement that the attack was the result of “a complete failure of the government’s security policies”.
The deadliest attack in recent years was a truck rampage at a Berlin Christmas market in December 2016 by a Tunisian man with jihadist motives that killed 13 people.
The run-up to last year’s general election saw a spate of attacks in public places.
However, the worst incident in that period saw a Saudi psychiatrist and anti-Islam activist, Taleb Jawad al-Abdulmohsen, kill six people and wound more than 300 in a car-ramming at a busy Christmas market in the eastern city of Magdeburg in 2024.
Source: AFP/sz/dc
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