Berlin Pride attack suspect killed by police after manhunt

Naomi Kresge, Bloomberg News on Jul 26, 2026

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The suspect in Saturday’s deadly van attack on Berlin’s LGBTQ pride event was shot dead early Sunday evening in a police operation in the German capital, city officials said.

Abdul Ballout was tracked by police to an allotment, or community garden, in the Spandau district of Berlin, a police spokesman said.

Ballout “rushed toward our emergency forces with a stabbing weapon, after which police firearms were used by our SEK Berlin,” the spokesman said on X. “Despite immediate resuscitation measures initiated by the Berlin Fire Department, he died at the scene.”

The shooting capped a daylong manhunt that stretched from central Berlin to the airport and Germany’s borders, with authorities publicizing Ballout’s photo and taking the unusual step of releasing his full name. The deadly van attack was an act of terror, striking at the heart of Germany’s open and free society, Chancellor Friedrich Merz said earlier on Sunday.

The German-born Ballout, 21, allegedly drove a white van into pedestrians on the fringes of Berlin’s Christopher Street Day event late Saturday night, killing one woman and injuring 29 other people. He was alleged to have attacked people with a machete after driving the van into the crowd.

Authorities said earlier on Sunday that the suspect was a known Islamic State sympathizer who’d attempted to join the jihadist military organization in 2025 before being taken into custody in Lebanon.

The investigation around the suspected terror attack continues, said Ines Peterson, a spokeswoman for the Office of the Federal Prosecutor. The investigation was transferred to the federal level on Sunday.

Police had taken positions around the allotment, a type of community garden that includes a patchwork of individual vegetable patches and small huts often separated by hedges, at about 3 p.m., Bild newspaper reported. Police closed in about 6 p.m. after evacuating other garden plots. The newspaper cited the garden association chairman as saying that people nearby heard two salvos of four shots each.