UPDATE: German police shot dead Abdul B, the main suspect in the Berlin Pride attack, during an operation at an allotment garden complex in the capital’s Spandau district on Sunday evening. Police said the 21-year-old ran towards officers carrying a bladed weapon, prompting them to open fire; attempts to resuscitate him failed. Authorities have since raised the casualty toll to one dead and 29 injured, while Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt designated the incident an Islamist terrorist attack and federal prosecutors assumed control of the investigation.
German police launched a large-scale manhunt on Sunday, 26 July, for a known Islamist suspected of involvement in a vehicle attack on Berlin’s Christopher Street Day celebrations that killed a woman and injured 16 people, three critically. A white Citroën van drove into crowds in Tiergarten shortly before 10pm on Saturday before crashing into a tree.
Christopher Street Day (CSD) is Germany’s name for Pride, an annual LGBTQ rights demonstration and celebration commemorating the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York.
Authorities identified the wanted man as 21-year-old Abdul B, warning that he may be armed and dangerous, although investigators have not established whether he drove the vehicle or acted with an accomplice. Police said one or more people fled after the crash and that several victims may also have been wounded with stabbing weapons.
German media have named the suspect as Abdul Rahman Toufic Ballout, a German citizen born in Berlin to a family of Lebanese immigrants. Police confirmed that he was already known to them and belonged to Berlin’s radical Islamist circles. BILD described him as a repeat offender and supporter of the terrorist organization Islamic State, while other reports said he had previously come to police attention over violent offences and extortion.
His security background raises further questions over Germany’s treatment of radicalized offenders. Ballout allegedly attempted to travel to Islamic State territory in Syria in 2025, but was arrested in Lebanon and returned to Germany. Berlin’s Tiergarten district court sentenced him in May to one year and ten months for preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state. He was nevertheless released while prosecutors appealed and ordered to attend 26 deradicalization sessions; he had completed only two, with a third scheduled for Monday.
The attack follows a succession of atrocities that have intensified Germany’s migration and security debate. An Afghan Islamist killed a police officer at an anti-Islam rally in Mannheim in 2024; a Syrian Islamic State supporter murdered three people in Solingen months later; and an Afghan asylum seeker drove a vehicle into a demonstration in Munich in February 2025, killing two people and injuring dozens.
The anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) said the latest bloodshed demonstrated the consequences of Germany’s ‘catastrophic migration policy’ and alleged ‘cuddling course’ towards violent Islamists. Berlin AfD leader Kristin Brinker demanded greater protection for residents and tougher action against extremist networks. AfD co-chair Alice Weidel expressed her condolences to the victims and their families.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz of the CDU described the attack as an assault on German society, while senior CDU politicians demanded heavier sentences for Islamist offenders, stricter naturalization rules, and the rapid adoption of pending security legislation. The central question is why a convicted and officially monitored Islamist regarded as a potential threat was free to disappear.
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