The suspect in the Berlin gay pride attack was shot dead by police.

Abdul Ballout, 21, the main suspect in the vehicle and machete attack that killed at least one person during the Pride march in BerlinHe was killed Sunday evening by special forces in the Spandau district. The German government had classified the incident as an Islamist terrorist attack.

The SEK-Berlin special unit opened fire on Abdul Ballout in a community garden in the Spandau district on Sunday evening, July 26. According to Berlin police, the suspect charged the officers with a knife. "Despite immediate resuscitation efforts by firefighters, the man died at the scene," police stated in a message posted on X.

The attack occurred the previous day, Saturday around 22 p.m., in the Tiergarten park, a few hundred meters from the Brandenburg Gate. A white Citroën minivan with Berlin license plates drove into pedestrians before crashing into a tree. The suspect then attacked other people with a machete. The toll: one woman killed and 29 injured, according to a revised figure released by Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt. The Chancellor Friedrich Merz indicated during a religious service at St. Mary's Church that no one seemed to be "in mortal danger" anymore.

Abdul Ballout was a German citizen of Lebanese origin with a long criminal record. The prosecution retraced his steps: convicted in May for attempting to join theÉtat islamique Having traveled through Syria via Lebanon, he was arrested there and then sent back to Germany. His sentence did not result in imprisonment, as his nine months of accumulated pretrial detention (six in Germany, three in Lebanon) and his admission of guilt were taken into account. Alexander Dobrindt described him as a man marked by "radicalization and his affiliation with Islamist circles."

"Everything we see here indicates that we are dealing with an Islamist terrorist attack," the minister had stated in the afternoon, before the fatal outcome of the manhunt. Hundreds of people observed a minute of silence in front of the Brandenburg Gate, at the invitation of members of the community. LGBTQ.

The attack revives painful memories in GermanyIn December 2016, a Tunisian man with jihadist motives killed 13 people at a Christmas market in Berlin. In December 2024, a car rammed into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, killing six and injuring more than 300. Last month, the perpetrator of this latter attack, Saudi psychiatrist Taleb Jawad al-Abdulmohsen, was sentenced to life imprisonment.