Berlin police shot and killed the suspect in this weekend’s deadly attack during the city’s Pride festival after he allegedly charged at officers with a knife while they tried to arrest him Sunday, authorities said.
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The 21-year-old suspect was found at 6 p.m. local time at an allotment garden complex in the Spandau district, Berlin police said. Authorities said he rushed at members of the city’s special police unit, or SEK, with a weapon, prompting officers to open fire. Despite firefighters’ resuscitation efforts, he died at the scene.
Authorities have accused the suspect of driving a vehicle into a crowd and attacking people with a bladed weapon near Brandenburg Gate on Saturday night, killing a woman and injuring 29 others.
Three of the injured people have life-threatening injuries, Berlin’s fire department spokesman Dominik Pretz said Sunday morning, adding that eight are seriously injured.
Police had identified the suspect as 21-year-old Abdul B., whom officials describe as a “radicalized” member of “Islamist circles” in Berlin.
“Everything we are seeing here indicates that we have experienced an Islamist attack,” German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said at a news conference Sunday.
He identified the suspect as a German citizen of Lebanese background known to police after committing crimes in the past. Abdul B. had previously been sentenced to one year and 10 months in prison in Berlin, he said, which was commuted to parole.
He was sentenced for preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state and violating an enforceable prohibition under the Associations Act, the Office of the Berlin Public Prosecutor General said in a statement. The sentence was handed down in May.
The office said the verdict was based on information that he had attempted to travel to Syria last year to join the Islamic State group but was arrested in Lebanon, where he was in contact with several people he believed were members of the group and was sentenced to three months in prison, in part for incitement to religious and sectarian conflict. After that, the office said, he returned to Germany, was arrested at Berlin Brandenburg Airport and was held in pretrial detention until the verdict.
The office said the court found that he had “published prohibited IS propaganda on his Instagram account on June 16 and 24, 2024.” In determining the sentence, the court considered the three months he was held in Lebanon and the six months he spent in pretrial detention in Germany, the office said.
It also “took into account that Abdul B. had largely confessed during the trial, distanced himself from ISIS, and that there had been no concrete threat to protected legal interests,” the office said.
Before that, he had been convicted assaulting someone at a Berlin high school in 2019, as well as robbing someone of a pair of headphones nearly a year later. He was also convicted in 2022 of assault and robbery by extortion, the office said.
Earlier this month, Berlin prosecutors searched his home for firearms but found only a toy gun and the case was dismissed.
Hundreds of thousands of people had gathered in Berlin for one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ celebrations. The parade had passed through the park earlier Saturday.
The attack was outside the secure festival area, Dobrindt said, adding that many of those attacked were going to or from the festival site. A vehicle used in the attack was removed from the scene Sunday.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has condemned the incident in Berlin as “a heinous act.”
“They wanted us to treat each other with kindness and tolerance. This is an attack on our society,” he wrote on X, adding that the attack will be investigated with the “utmost severity.”
Saturday “should have been a day of joy, visibility and freedom,” Alfonso Pantisano, the Berlin state government’s queer liaison officer, wrote on social media.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen expressed her sympathy to the victims Sunday, saying the Pride event stands for “freedom, dignity, and equality.”
“Every person should be able to live, love, and stand up for their rights without fear,” she wrote on social media.
