Berlin pride crowd attacker tried to join ISIS in Syria, authorities say
A driver rammed a van into revelers at Berlin’s pride festival Saturday, then got out and stabbed people with a machete, violence German officials called Islamic terrorism. One woman was killed and 29 others were injured.
Police said the van entered Tiergarten park near 10 p.m. Saturday, struck several people and hit a tree, The Associated Press reported. The violence happened on a park path, not along the parade route or at the closing celebration, though the spot was a few hundred yards from that gathering near the Brandenburg Gate.
A police spokesperson said witnesses saw wounded people on the ground after the stabbings.
Police named the suspect as Abdul Ballout, a 21-year-old German citizen with Lebanese heritage who had previously sought to enter Syria to join Islamic State and had gone through a de-radicalization program.
More than 2,000 officers took part in the manhunt that followed, The Telegraph reported.
Officers located Ballout around 6 p.m. Sunday in a garden plot in Spandau, on Berlin’s outskirts, police said on X, ending a search of nearly 24 hours. He ran toward them holding an edged weapon, officers said. Police fired at least one shot, and he died at the scene.
Ballout had past convictions for causing serious bodily injury and coercion before he became an extremist more recently, according to The German newspaper Welt.
Berlin prosecutors said Ballout left for Lebanon in 2025 intending to reach Syria and join Islamic State. Lebanese authorities arrested him last year, and a military tribunal jailed him three months for incitement to religious and sectarian strife.
He returned to Germany after finishing that sentence and was detained upon arrival at Berlin’s airport. In May, a Berlin juvenile court found him guilty of preparing a serious act of violence against the state and posting Islamic State propaganda on Instagram. He received a suspended sentence of one year and 10 months in youth detention. Berlin prosecutors appealed the sentence.
Judges cited his confession and apparent break from the militant group, and he remained free pending that appeal.
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt was quoted as saying Ballout's mother, from Lebanon, gained German citizenship in 2002, three years before his birth.
"We are dealing here with a suspected perpetrator, who had previously drawn attention to himself through a high volume of criminal offences, radicalisation and affiliation with the Islamist scene," Dobrindt told the press.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz called the incident heinous and an assault on German society, urging participants in Christopher Street Day Pride celebrations nationwide not to be intimidated.
Dobrindt said security arrangements at other major German gatherings, including pride events, would likely be reviewed and tightened.
Hundreds of thousands had gathered in Berlin for Saturday’s festival, one of Europe’s largest LGBT gatherings, whose closing party near the Brandenburg Gate followed a parade of about 80 trucks through downtown Berlin earlier that day.
Hundreds of mourners gathered Sunday afternoon at a memorial near the Brandenburg Gate, laying flowers, candles, rainbow flags and handmade signs.
Public spaces in Germany have seen repeated violent attacks in recent years.
A Spanish tourist was seriously wounded in a stabbing at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial in February last year. A Syrian man, identified only as Wassim Al M, was sentenced to 13 years in March for that assault.
Last month, Saudi psychiatrist Taleb Jawad al-Abdulmohsen, 51, received a life sentence for six deaths and more than 300 injuries after driving a rented SUV through a Magdeburg Christmas market in 2024. His trial testimony contained conspiracy theories.
The single deadliest assault of this kind in recent years happened in December 2016, when a Tunisian man whose asylum claim had been rejected drove a hijacked truck into a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 people by one account and 13 by another. He died in a shootout with police in Italy days afterward.
