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BERLIN (AP) — German investigators were searching Sunday for a man suspected of driving a van into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride festival, killing one person and injuring several people before apparently stabbing others with a machete in what authorities believe was an Islamic extremist terror attack.
Authorities issued a wanted notice and warned people against approaching Abdul Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, saying that he may be armed and dangerous.
“Everything we see here points to us dealing with an Islamic terror attack,” Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said.
Dobrindt put the total number of wounded at 29. The attack occurred a few hundred meters (yards) from a party near the Brandenburg Gate that was supposed to close out the city’s Pride festival.
Ashley Jump, a 26-year-old U.K. resident, had traveled to Berlin for Saturday’s Pride parade but had left the celebrations before the attack. They returned Sunday to leave flowers at a memorial near the crime scene in support of the LGBTQ+ community.
“They’ll never erase us, we’ll never be gone,” they said. “As long as humanity has existed, we’ve existed. And as long as humanity exists, we will exist. We will not be removed.”
Suspect allegedly has ties to Islamic extremism
Dobrindt said the suspect had come to authorities’ attention in the past because of numerous previous crimes, of which he didn’t give details, and also because of “radicalization and belonging to the Islamist scene” in the German capital.
He said Ballout was born in Germany, and that his mother was naturalized in 2002 — three years before he was born.
Dobrindt said the suspect had been convicted in Berlin in the past, though he didn’t specify for what. He said that he had been given a suspended sentence of 1 year and 10 months.
Police conducted operations in the city as they searched for the suspect. Those included a search at an apartment in Berlin’s Schöneberg district in the early hours of Sunday, but police said they found no one there.
Berlin’s Pride festival is one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ celebrations
According to police, a white van drove into the Tiergarten park around 10 p.m. and hit several people before colliding with a tree. The closing party at the Pride festival, known as Christopher Street Day, was ongoing at the time next to the Brandenburg Gate, a short distance away. The party followed a parade with some 80 trucks that had made its way through downtown Berlin earlier in the day.
The attack did not occur at the festival, along its route or at the closing party. Rather, the violence took place a few hundred meters (yards) away on a track in the Tiergarten park. The van drove into a crowd that was likely a mix of festivalgoers and other locals or visitors.
Police said a woman was killed. Berlin’s fire service said that three people sustained life-threatening injuries and another eight were seriously injured.
The Pride event next to the Brandenburg Gate was called off around 10:15 p.m. and a band’s performance on stage was interrupted. People were urged to go home and to avoid taking the route through the park.
On Sunday afternoon, hundreds of mourners gathered at a memorial at the iconic gate. They hugged each other and laid down flowers, candles, rainbow flags and homemade signs, including a cardboard one that said: “the only thing more powerful than hate is love.”
Hundreds of thousands had come to Berlin to celebrate on Saturday, though it’s unclear how many were still at the festival by late evening. It’s one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ celebrations.
The van, with its battered front resting against a tree, could still be seen at the scene Sunday morning.
“We are simply stunned by what happened,” said Andre Lehmann, a top official with the main national LGBTQ+ association, LSVD+. “This suspected attack hits the heart of the queer community.”
Amsterdam says it will celebrate freedom in the wake of Berlin attack
Chancellor Friedrich Merz vowed that law enforcement would find the suspect.
“I would like to say this to Christopher Street Day participants here in Berlin but also across Germany: Don’t let yourselves, let us not let ourselves, be intimidated,” he said. “These acts have only one purpose: They aim to divide our society. They want to take away from us the most important thing we have: Namely our openness and our freedom.”
Dobrindt said he expected security measures at other major events in Germany, including Pride events elsewhere, to be reviewed and if necessary significantly strengthened.
He pointed to concern about possible copycat crimes, adding that “this is not typical of such situations, but it also can’t be ruled out.”
Berlin has seen Islamic extremist attacks before. In December, 2016, a rejected asylum seeker from Tunisia plowed a hijacked truck into a Christmas market, killing 13 people and injuring dozens. He was killed days later in a shootout in Italy.
In February last year, a Spanish tourist was stabbed and seriously wounded at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial. A Syrian man was convicted in March and sentenced to 13 years in prison.
Saturday’s violence “is suspected to be an Islamist terror attack on our way of living together, on our liberal democracy, on our openness and our freedom,” Wegner said.
In the neighboring Netherlands, Amsterdam is hosting World Pride this week and next alongside its own annual Pride celebrations. Mayor Femke Halsema said authorities and organizers “are closely monitoring the security situation” after the Berlin attack but aim to prevent any extra measures getting in the way of celebrating freedom and love.
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Associated Press reporters Kirsten Grieshaber, Fanny Brodersen, Pietro De Cristofaro and Stefanie Dazio in Berlin, and Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands, contributed to this report.
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