A young German of Lebanese origin was killed on the evening of Sunday July 26 by the police in Berlin, according to the authorities who consider him to be the author of the car-ramming and stabbing attack the day before on the sidelines of gay pride, which left one dead and around thirty injured.
“According to the information we have at this stage, (the suspect) ran towards our intervention forces armed with a bladed weapon.” The members of the special unit “SEK-Berlin then used their firearms,” Berlin police said on X. Despite the intervention of the firefighters, “the man died at the scene,” according to the police. The operation took place in a allotment garden in the Spandau district of Berlin.
Earlier, German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt revised the death toll upwards to 29 injured, compared to 16 previously. The deceased victim is a woman. While the day before, firefighters had reported 3 emergency injuries, no one anymore seems to be “in danger of death”, announced Chancellor Friedrich Merz during a religious service at St. Mary’s Church in Berlin.
The suspect, whose name the minister revealed, Abdul Ballout, was a 21-year-old “German citizen of Lebanese origin” with a criminal record including “radicalization and membership in the Islamist milieu,” added Alexander Dobrindt, before the announcement of the death of the alleged sympathizer of the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group.
Late Sunday, the prosecution traced in a press release the legal journey of the suspect, convicted in May for trying to join IS in Syria via Lebanon, where he was arrested, convicted and returned to Germany.
If Abdul Ballout was sentenced to a custodial sentence but not imprisoned, it is because his six months of pre-trial detention in Germany and his three months of detention in Lebanon were taken into account, as well as the fact of having admitted the facts, explains the prosecution.
Machete
The attack took place on Saturday around 10 p.m. in the Tiergarten park, a few hundred meters from the Brandenburg Gate, the main gathering place on the evening of the pride march, called Christopher Street Day (CSD) in Germany.
The incident cut short a day of celebration for hundreds of thousands of people. According to police, a white vehicle drove into passers-by before hitting a tree. Registered in Berlin, this Citroën minivan was visible on site on Sunday morning. Heavily damaged after hitting a tree, it was towed by investigators.
The suspect “then rushed at other passers-by, armed with a bladed weapon (…) – probably a machete – and also seriously injured them,” described Alexander Dobrindt. On Sunday, the police no longer mentioned the hypothesis of an attack involving several perpetrators as the day before.
The police had launched a call for witnesses, accompanied by a photo and a physical description of the suspect: thin, approximately 1.90 meters tall, with black hair and wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and white pants. “These acts have only one goal: to divide our society,” Chancellor Friedrich Merz reacted on Sunday, before attending the religious service honoring the victims.
Bad memories
Invited by members of the LGBTQ community to a vigil in front of the Brandenburg Gate early Sunday afternoon, hundreds of people observed a minute of silence.
This attack revived the memory of a series of similar acts which shook Germany in recent years, fueling the debate on immigration, several of the perpetrators being of foreign origin. The deadliest attack in recent years was that in December 2016 against a Christmas market in Berlin by a Tunisian with jihadist motivations. It left 13 dead.
The period preceding the 2025 legislative elections was also marked by a wave of attacks in public places, notably perpetrated by Islamist attackers.
These attacks gave rise to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has become the leading opposition force and which is now ahead of Friedrich Merz’s right in voting intentions. On Sunday, an AfD MP, Martin Hess, estimated that the gay pride attack “reveals once again the total failure of those responsible in matters of security” and immigration.
