The suspect in the deadly Berlin Pride attack A man was shot dead by police during a clash Sunday in a city suburb that left one person dead and 29 injured, authorities said.
Abdul Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, was killed in central Berlin after a nearly 24-hour search for the attack. Prosecutors said he had previously tried to join the Islamic State militant group.
Ballout was suspected of driving a van into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride festival on Saturday evening before apparently stabbing others with a machete in what authorities believe was an Islamist extremist terrorist attack.
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the attack occurred a few hundred meters from a party near the Brandenburg Gate that was supposed to mark the end of the city’s Pride festival.
Ballout was tracked down around 6 p.m. on Sunday in a garden in Spandau, a Berlin suburb, the city’s police wrote on He died at the scene of the accident.
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 U.K. resident, had traveled to Berlin for Saturday’s Pride parade but left the celebrations before the attack. They returned on Sunday to leave flowers at a memorial near the crime scene in support of the LGBTQ+ community.
“They will never wipe us out, we will never disappear,” they said. “As long as humanity exists, we exist. And as long as humanity exists, we will exist. We will not be removed.”
Suspect convicted of links to Islamic extremism
Ballout traveled to Lebanon in 2025 with the aim of going to Syria to join the Islamic State group, Berlin prosecutors said Sunday.
There he made contact with several people who were probably members of the militant group – or at least assumed they were, according to the public prosecutor’s office. He was arrested in Lebanon last year and sentenced to three months in prison by a military court for crimes including inciting religious and sectarian conflict.
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After serving his sentence, he returned to Germany, where he was arrested at Berlin airport.
In May, a juvenile court in Berlin convicted Ballout of preparing a serious subversive act of violence, publishing Islamic State propaganda on his Instagram account, and other charges, prosecutors said.
The court imposed a suspended sentence of one year and ten months in juvenile detention, against which the Berlin public prosecutor’s office appealed.
The court said it took into account Ballout’s months of pretrial detention in Germany and Lebanon. It also said it was believed that Ballout had confessed to the crimes, appeared to have distanced himself from the militant group and that no actual threat ever arose.
He was released from custody pending an appeal.
The Berlin Pride Festival is one of the largest LGBTQ+ celebrations in Europe
According to the police, a white van drove into the zoo around 10 p.m., hit several people and then collided with a tree. The closing party of the Pride festival, known as Christopher Street Day, was taking place in the immediate vicinity of the Brandenburg Gate at this time. The party followed a parade of about 80 trucks that drove 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 occurred a few hundred meters away on a track in the Tiergarten. The van drove into a crowd that was likely a mix of festival-goers and other locals or visitors.
According to police, a woman was killed.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called the attack “horrific.”
“The attack at the Christopher Street Day festival in Berlin is terrible,” Carney wrote in a post
On Sunday afternoon, hundreds of mourners gathered at a memorial at the famous gate. They hugged and laid flowers, candles, rainbow flags and homemade signs, including a cardboard sign that read: “The only thing stronger than hate is love.”
Hundreds of thousands came to Berlin to celebrate on Saturday, but it is unclear how many were still at the festival late in the evening. It is one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ celebrations.
“We are simply stunned by what happened,” said Andre Lehmann, a top official at the main national LGBTQ+ association, LSVD+. “This alleged attack strikes at the heart of the queer community.”
Amsterdam says it will celebrate freedom after the Berlin attack
Chancellor Friedrich Merz called on the nation to show unity after the attack.
“I would like to say to the participants of Christopher Street Day here in Berlin, but also throughout Germany: Don’t let us intimidate you,” he said. “These acts have only one purpose: They aim to divide our society. They want to take away the most important thing we have: namely our openness and our freedom.”
Dobrindt said he assumed that security measures at other major events in Germany, including Pride events elsewhere, would be reviewed and, if necessary, significantly strengthened.
There have been attacks by Islamist extremists in Berlin before. In December 2016, a rejected asylum seeker from Tunisia drove 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 injured at the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. In this attack, a Syrian man was sentenced to 13 years in prison in March.
This week, Amsterdam will also host World Pride alongside its own annual Pride celebrations. Mayor Femke Halsema said authorities and organizers were “closely monitoring the security situation” after the attack in Berlin but aimed to prevent additional measures from standing in the way of 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.
