Berlin police said they have identified a suspect who has not been arrested and he has ties to Islamic extremists in the German capital. 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. Prosecutors said he had previously sought to join the militant Daesh group.
Ballout was suspected of driving a van into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride festival Saturday night before apparently stabbing others with a machete in what authorities believe was an Islamic extremist terror attack.
“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 festival.
Ballout was born in Germany, the minister said. His mother was naturalized in 2002, three years before he was born.
Suspect convicted of ties to Islamic extremism
Ballout traveled to Lebanon in 2025 with the goal of going to Syria to join the Daesh 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 Daesh 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.
“The suspect is known to police. He is known to us as a member of Islamic circles here in Berlin, and our search for this person is proceeding at full speed,” said police spokesman Florian Nath. He did not identify the suspect by name.
Earlier, police said some of the victims had life-threatening injuries. In a post on X, police called on everyone to leave the site of the event immediately as ambulances and firefighters attended to the victims.
“We are conducting an intensive search for possible suspects,” police officer Florian Nath said on a short video released on the Berlin police account on X.
According to police, a white van had driven into the Tiergarten park around 10 pm, which is next to the route that the pride march had passed along earlier, and hit several people before colliding with a tree. Police could not say how many officers had been deployed to the scene but that it was “definitely a lot of police.”
Overall, more than 2,200 police officers have been on duty in Berlin since Saturday morning to protect the pride parade and other LGBTQ+ events in the city.
Police were conducting witness interrogations at the park during the night and were investigating accounts that in addition to the crash some victims appeared to have suffered stab wounds - but that it was too early to draw any conclusion from those accounts.
Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner expressed shock, saying that “following a peaceful and vibrant pride parade, the rally for a tolerant and peaceful Berlin was attacked in the most brutal manner.”
“This is an attack on our free and cosmopolitan society,” Wegner said. “I have confidence in the police and security authorities, who will be working around the clock to investigate.”
Meanwhile, authorities called on possible witnesses to come forward and share with police any video or photos they might have taken at the scene of the attack.
The city also activated a crisis hotline for people missing friends or family members.
Hundreds of thousands of people had come to Berlin on Saturday to celebrate at Berlin’s pride parade, known in Germany as Christopher Street Day. It’s one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ celebrations.
The pride event in front of the city’s Brandenburg Gate, near Tiergarten, was called off around 10:15 pm and a band’s performance on stage was interrupted. People were urged to go home and to avoid taking the route through the park.
Before the incident, people had celebrated peacefully, marching through the city for hours, dancing to loud music, and cheering the around 80 floats that participated in the parade.
Julian Miethig, who had attended the LGBTQ+ party at the Brandenburg Gate earlier, said he had just wanted to go to an afterparty when he heard from a friend that “something bad happened there and there are a lot of fire trucks, a lot of emergency vehicles, ambulances.”
He said he went to Tiergarten and was shocked that something like this could have happened at Berlin’s pride celebrations.“It’s a dark day for the community,” he said.