The suspect in the deadly Berlin Pride attack is killed in a
confrontation with police
[July 27, 2026]
By GEIR MOULSON, KIRSTEN GRIESHABER and STEFANIE DAZIO
BERLIN (AP) — 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 Islamic State 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.
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said 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 tracked down around 6 p.m. Sunday at a garden in Spandau, a
Berlin suburb, the city's police department wrote on X. They said he
apparently ran toward officers with a sharp instrument, and police fired
at least one shot. He died at the scene.
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.”
Suspect convicted of ties to Islamic extremism
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 had 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.
Berlin's Pride festival is one of Europe's largest LGBTQ+
celebrations
According to 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 at the Pride festival, known as Christopher Street Day, was
ongoing at the time next to the Brandenburg Gate, a short distance away.
The party followed a parade with some 80 trucks that had made its way
through downtown Berlin earlier in the day.
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People gather in front of the Brandenburg Gate illuminated with the
message "Berlin, city of freedom", commemorating the victims, after
a car rammed into a crowd at the Pride March in Berlin, Sunday, July
26, 2026. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
The attack did not occur at the festival, along its route or at the
closing party. Rather, the violence took place a few hundred meters
(yards) away on a track in the Tiergarten park. The van drove into a
crowd that was likely a mix of festivalgoers and other locals or
visitors.
Police said a woman was killed.
On Sunday afternoon, hundreds of mourners gathered at a memorial at
the iconic gate. They hugged each other and laid down flowers,
candles, rainbow flags and homemade signs, including a cardboard one
that said: “the only thing more powerful than hate is love.”
Hundreds of thousands had come to Berlin to celebrate on Saturday,
though it’s unclear how many were still at the festival by late
evening. It’s one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ celebrations.
“We are simply stunned by what happened,” said Andre Lehmann, a top
official with the main national LGBTQ+ association, LSVD+. “This
suspected attack hits the heart of the queer community.”
Amsterdam says it will celebrate freedom in the wake of Berlin
attack
Chancellor Friedrich Merz urged the nation to remain united in the
aftermath of the attack.
“I would like to say this to Christopher Street Day participants
here in Berlin but also across Germany: Don’t let yourselves, let us
not let ourselves, be intimidated," he said. "These acts have only
one purpose: They aim to divide our society. They want to take away
from us the most important thing we have: Namely our openness and
our freedom.”
Dobrindt said he expected security measures at other major events in
Germany, including Pride events elsewhere, to be reviewed and if
necessary significantly boosted.
Berlin has seen Islamic extremist attacks before. In December, 2016,
a rejected asylum seeker from Tunisia plowed a hijacked truck into a
Christmas market, killing 13 people and injuring dozens. He was
killed days later in a shootout in Italy.
In February last year, a Spanish tourist was stabbed and seriously
wounded at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, an attack that saw a Syrian
man convicted in March and sentenced to 13 years.
This week, Amsterdam will be hosting World Pride alongside its own
annual Pride celebrations. Mayor Femke Halsema said authorities and
organizers “are closely monitoring the security situation” after the
Berlin attack but aim to prevent any extra measures getting in the
way of celebrating freedom and love.
___
Associated Press reporters Fanny Brodersen and Pietro De Cristofaro
in Berlin, and Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands, contributed to
this report.
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