Police Kill Suspect After Berlin Pride Car-Ramming and Knife Attack

A 21-year-old man with a record of Islamic extremist activity was shot dead by police on 26 July, a day after he allegedly drove a van into people near Berlin’s Pride celebrations, German police say.

The ramming attack happened at around 10:00 p.m. on 25 July in Tiergarten Park, a few hundred meters from a Pride festival party near the Brandenburg Gate, the Associated Press (AP) reported. One woman was killed in the ramming, and several other people were struck. After the assailant crashed his vehicle into a tree, he attacked other people with a machete. Twenty-nine people were injured, in addition to the woman who was killed.

The driver left the van and fled on foot. Police searched the area with infrared cameras overnight. The suspected attacker, identified as Abdul Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, was tracked down around 6:00 p.m. on 26 July at a garden in a Berlin suburb. He ran toward officers with a sharp instrument, and police fired at least one shot, police say. Ballout died at the scene.

The motive for the attack has not been established, DW reported, but based on the suspect’s background, authorities are treating the attack as an act of terror.

Ballout had a history of attempted terrorist involvement, Berlin prosecutors said yesterday. In 2025, he traveled to Lebanon with the goal of joining the Islamic State (IS) in Syria. He was arrested in Lebanon and sentenced by a military court to three months’ imprisonment. After he returned to Germany, 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, plus publishing IS propaganda online. Offenders who are 18 to 21 years old can be prosecuted in Germany’s juvenile system.

After his time in Lebanon, Ballout had allegedly distanced himself from IS. The court argued that Ballout’s pretrial detention had been particularly long and he did not meet statutory requirements about flight risk or reoffending, leading to his release while his suspended sentence was appealed.

The court had ordered Ballout to attend a deradicalization program for high-risk offenders. The program was likely to tell the court that Ballout was not a candidate for the program “because he sought to misrepresent himself as a friendly person who was not an extremist and therefore did not need to be deradicalized,” the AP reported. The program’s leaders told the AP that Ballout tried to tell staff what they wanted to hear, rather than the truth, although program staff did not suspect that Ballout was planning any attacks.

Some German officials are now questioning the decision to release Ballout before the sentencing appeal. They have vowed to investigate whether juvenile sentencing needs to be reformed and why Ballout was released.

For more on vehicle ramming attacks and soft targets, see these related articles from Security Management:

• Mitigating Vehicle Ramming Threats with Layered Protection
  
  
• Scrutiny of Vehicle-Ramming Prevention Methods Continues as Bourbon Street Reopens
  
  
• The Balancing Act: How Soft Targets Can Attract Guests While Discouraging Attacks
  
  
• Crash Ratings 101: The Cornerstone of Effective High Security Vehicle Barrier Systems