German investigators on Sunday hunted a person who allegedly drove a van right into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride festival, killing one person and wounding many more, before apparently stabbing others with a machete in what authorities imagine 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 could also be armed and dangerous.
“All the things we see here points to us coping with an Islamic terror attack,” Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said.
Dobrindt put the overall variety of injured at 29.
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 go away 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. “So long as humanity has existed, we’ve existed. And so long as humanity exists, we’ll exist. We won’t be removed.”
Suspect allegedly has ties to Islamic extremism
Dobrindt said the suspect had come to authorities’ attention prior to now because of various previous crimes, of which he didn’t give details, and in addition due to “radicalization and belonging to the Islamist scene” within the German capital.
He said Ballout was born in Germany, and that his mother was naturalized in 2002 — three years before he was born.
Dobrindt said the suspect had been convicted in Berlin prior to now, though he didn’t specify for what. He said that he had been given a suspended sentence of 1 12 months and 10 months.
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Police conducted operations in town as they looked for the suspect. Those included a search at an apartment in Berlin’s Schöneberg district within the early hours of Sunday, but police said they found nobody there.
Berlin’s Pride festival is one among Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ celebrations
Based on police, a white van drove into the Tiergarten park around 10 p.m. and hit several people before colliding with a tree. The closing party on the Pride festival, referred to as Christopher Street Day, was ongoing on the time next to the Brandenburg Gate, a brief distance away. The party followed a parade with some 80 trucks that had made its way through downtown Berlin earlier within the day.
The attack didn’t occur on the festival, along its route or on the closing party. Moderately, the violence took place a number of hundred meters (yards) away on a track within the Tiergarten park. The van drove right into a crowd that was likely a mixture of festivalgoers and other locals or visitors.
Police said a girl was killed. Berlin’s fire service said that three people sustained life-threatening injuries and one other eight were seriously injured.
The Pride event next to the Brandenburg Gate was called off around 10:15 p.m. and a band’s performance on stage was interrupted. People were urged to go home and to avoid taking the route through the park.
Lots of of hundreds of individuals had come to Berlin to have a good time on Saturday, though it’s unclear what number of were still on the festival by late evening. It’s one among Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ celebrations.
The van, with its battered front resting against a tree, could still be seen on the scene Sunday morning.
“We’re simply stunned by what happened,” said Andre Lehmann, a top official with the major national LGBTQ+ association, LSVD+. “This suspected attack hits the center of the queer community.”
Amsterdam says it’s going to have a good time freedom within the wake of Berlin attack
Chancellor Friedrich Merz described what happened as “an attack on our society.” He added in a post on X that Germany loves freedom, “and we’ll preserve and defend that.”
Dobrindt said he expected security measures at other major events in Germany, including Pride events elsewhere, to be reviewed and if needed significantly strengthened.
He pointed to concern about possible copycat crimes, adding that “this just isn’t typical of such situations, nevertheless it can also’t be ruled out.”
Berlin has seen Islamic extremist attacks before. In December, 2016, a rejected asylum seeker from Tunisia plowed a hijacked truck right into a Christmas market, killing 13 people and injuring dozens. He was killed days later in a shootout in Italy.
In February last 12 months, a Spanish tourist was stabbed and seriously wounded at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial. A Syrian man was convicted in March and sentenced to 13 years in prison.
Saturday’s violence “is suspected to be an Islamist terror attack on our way of life together, on our liberal democracy, on our openness and our freedom,” Wegner said.
Within the neighboring Netherlands, Amsterdam is hosting World Pride this week and next alongside its own annual Pride celebrations. Mayor Femke Halsema said authorities and organizers “are closely monitoring the safety situation” after the Berlin attack but aim to forestall any extra measures getting in the best way of celebrating 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.
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