Suspect in deadly Berlin Pride incident killed in confrontation with police – National

The suspect in the deadly Berlin Pride attack that left one person dead and 29 injured, was shot and killed by police during an altercation Sunday in the suburbs, authorities said.

Abdul Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, was killed following an investigation that lasted almost 24 hours after the attack in the city of Berlin. Prosecutors say he previously wanted to join the Islamic State terrorist group.

Ballout is accused of driving a van into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride Festival on Saturday night before stabbing others with a machete in what authorities believe was an Islamic terrorist attack.

Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the attack happened a few hundred meters away from a party near the Brandenburg Gate that was supposed to close the city’s Pride festival.

Ballout was followed around 18:00 on Sunday in a garden in Spandau, in the Berlin area, the police department of this city wrote in X. When he ran towards the police with a sharp knife, the police fired at least once. He died at the scene.

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

Ashley Jump, a 26-year-old UK citizen, was in Berlin for a Pride event on Saturday but left the celebrations before the attack. They returned on Sunday to lay flowers at a memorial near the crime scene in support of the LGBTQ+ community.

“They will never turn us off, we will never leave,” they said. “Since time immemorial humanity has existed, and as long as humanity exists, we will exist. We will not be removed.”

The suspect was convicted of collaborating with Islamic extremism

Ballout traveled to Lebanon in 2025 with the intention of going to Syria to join the Islamic State group, Berlin prosecutors said on Sunday.

There, he contacted several people who were thought to be members of the militant group – or at least he believed they were, prosecutors said. He was arrested in Lebanon last year and sentenced by a military court for three months for charges including inciting religious and sectarian conflict.

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He returned to Germany after serving his sentence, where he was arrested at Berlin airport.

In May, a juvenile court in Berlin convicted Ballout of preparing a serious act of violence that endangers the state, as well as publishing Islamic State propaganda on his Instagram account and other charges, prosecutors said.

The court issued a suspended sentence of one year and ten months in juvenile detention, which Berlin prosecutors appealed.

The court said it took Ballout months of pre-trial detention in Germany and Lebanon. It also said that considering that Ballout confessed to the crimes, he appeared to distance himself from the terrorist group and no real threat was ever presented.

He was released from custody pending an appeal.

Berlin’s Pride festival is one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ festivals

According to the police, a white van entered the Tiergarten park around 10:00 and hit several people before colliding with a tree. The closing party of the Pride festival, known as Christopher Street Day, was going on at the time near the Brandenburg Gate, a short distance away. The party followed a parade of about 80 trucks that had passed through downtown Berlin earlier in the day.

The attack did not take place at the festival, on its way or at the closing ceremony. Instead, the violence took place a few hundred meters (yards) away from the trail in Tiergarten park. The van drove into a crowd that was probably a mix of festival goers and other locals or tourists.

Police said a woman was killed.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called the attack “horrible.”

“The attack on the Christopher Street Day festival in Berlin is horrific,” Carney wrote on the X blog. “No one should have to face hate or violence because of who they are or who they love. My thoughts are with the victims, their loved ones, and the 2SLGBTQIA+ community in Berlin and around the world.”

On Sunday afternoon, hundreds of mourners gathered at the memorial at the statue’s gate. They hugged and placed flowers, candles, rainbow flags and homemade signs, including a cardboard saying: “the only thing stronger than hate is love.”

Hundreds of thousands came to Berlin to celebrate on Saturday, although it was not clear how many were still at the party late into the evening. It is one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ festivals.

“We are just amazed at what happened,” said Andre Lehmann, chief executive of the national LGBTQ+ organization, LSVD+. “This suspicious attack touches the hearts of the local community.”

Amsterdam says it will celebrate independence after Berlin attack

Chancellor Friedrich Merz urged the nation to remain united after this attack.

“I would like to say this to the participants of Christopher Street Day here in Berlin but also throughout Germany: Don’t allow yourself, we don’t allow ourselves, to be intimidated,” he said. “These actions have only one goal: They aim to divide our society. They want to take away the most important thing we have: Our openness and our freedom.”

Dobrindt said he expects security measures at other major events in Germany, including Pride events elsewhere, to be reviewed and if necessary improved.

Berlin has seen Islamist attacks before. In December 2016, a rejected asylum seeker from Tunisia plowed into a hijacked truck at 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 injured at the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, an attack for which a Syrian man was convicted in March and sentenced to 13 years in prison.

This week, Amsterdam will host World Pride alongside its annual Pride celebrations. Mayor Femke Halsema said authorities and organizers are “closely monitoring the security situation” after the Berlin attack but intend to prevent any other measures that disrupt the celebration of freedom and love.

–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.