German police shot and killed a convicted terrorist who once tried to join the Islamic State after he plowed a van into crowds at Berlin’s Pride festival Saturday night and then hacked at bystanders with a machete, killing one woman and wounding dozens in an attack officials are already linking to radical Islamist ideology.
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The German newspaper Die Zeit reported that 21-year-old Abdul Ballout was killed by police at a housing complex in Spandau, one of Berlin’s largest boroughs, following a massive manhunt. The Associated Press confirmed the report soon after.
Police say Ballout deliberately steered a white van into a crowd in Berlin’s Tiergarten park around 10 p.m., killing one woman and injuring at least 29 other people before jumping out and attacking festivalgoers on foot with what authorities believe was a machete. He then fled what officials called a horrific scene, setting off a citywide search that ended hours later when officers tracked him down and shot him dead.
German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt tied the rampage to radical Islamist ideology, a connection that comes as little surprise given Ballout’s history. The BBC reported he was a German citizen of Lebanese descent already known to police as part of Berlin’s Islamist scene, with a record of prior crimes. His mother became a naturalized German citizen in 2002, three years before Ballout was born in the country he would go on to attack.
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The Telegraph reported Ballout was in fact a convicted terrorist, having once attempted to join the Islamic State in Syria. German authorities arrested him in Lebanon after accusing him of trying to join the terror group and plotting an attack, then returned him to Germany, where, according to Die Welt, he was sentenced to one year and 10 months in prison for plotting a serious act of violence that threatened the state.
German authorities have not detailed what supervision, if any, Ballout faced after his release from prison, nor whether his return from Lebanon triggered added monitoring given his documented attempt to join a foreign terrorist group. Saturday’s attack marks one of the deadliest assaults on an LGBT gathering in recent German memory and adds to a string of Islamist inspired attacks that have struck European cities in recent years, reigniting calls from critics of Berlin’s security establishment for tougher immigration and counterterrorism policies.
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