Suspect in deadly Berlin attack is killed in shootout with police, German 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 the 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. Berlin prosecutors said the suspect had previously sought to join the militant Islamic State group.

 

German investigators were searching Sunday for a man suspected of driving a van into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride festival, killing one person and injuring several people before apparently stabbing others with a machete in what authorities believe was an Islamic extremist terror attack.

Authorities issued a wanted notice and warned people against approaching Abdul Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, saying that he may be armed and dangerous. Berlin prosecutors later Sunday said the suspect had previously sought to join the militant Islamic State group.

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

Dobrindt put the total number of wounded at 29. The attack occurred a few hundred meters (yards) from a party near the Brandenburg Gate that was supposed to 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 U.K. resident, had traveled 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 LGBTQ+ 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.”

Ballout traveled to Lebanon in 2025 with the goal of going to Syria to join the Islamic State group, 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’ imprisonment for offenses including incitement to religious and sectarian conflict.

He 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 Islamic State propaganda on his Instagram account and other charges, prosecutors said.

The court handed down a suspended sentence of 1 year and 10 months in youth custody, which Berlin prosecutors have appealed.

The court said it took Ballout’s months of pre-trial 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.