German police shot and killed a 21-year-old man on July 26, a day after he allegedly drove a minivan into a crowd in Berlin’s Tiergarten park, crashed into a tree, and attacked several people with a machete.
The crash occurred around 10 p.m. on July 25, just a few hundred yards from Berlin’s annual Christopher Street Day celebration, one of Europe’s largest Pride events. Police said the victims appeared to include Pride attendees and others who were in the park.
Authorities told Reuters that one person was killed and 29 others were injured, many in the machete attack.
“Everything we are seeing here indicates that we have experienced an Islamist attack,” German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said in a statement to the press.
Berlin police identified the suspected attacker as Abdul Ballout, a German citizen of Lebanese descent. Ballout was born in Germany, and his mother became a naturalized citizen in 2002, three years before his birth.
After launching a manhunt, Berlin police found Ballout at an allotment garden complex in the city’s Spandau borough around 6 p.m., according to a post on X.
“[Ballout] ran towards officers while armed with a bladed weapon; police… subsequently opened fire,” the post reads. “Despite immediate resuscitation efforts by the Berlin Fire Department, he died at the scene.”
Berlin police spokesman Florian Nath previously told The Associated Press that authorities had no information about Ballout’s alleged motives.
Dobrindt said Ballout had previously come to the attention of authorities for multiple crimes, as well as his “radicalization and belonging to the Islamist scene.” He added that Ballout had received a suspended prison sentence of one year and 10 months, but did not disclose the crime for which he was convicted.
According to NBC News, the Berlin Public Prosecutor General’s Office said Ballout had been sentenced for preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state and violating an enforceable ban under the Associations Act.
The office said Ballout had attempted to travel to Syria last year to join the Islamic State group but was arrested in Lebanon, where he had been in contact with several Islamic State members. He was sentenced to three months in prison before returning to Germany, where he was arrested and detained until the verdict.
It also said the court found that Ballout had “published prohibited IS propaganda on his Instagram account on June 16 and 24, 2024.” In imposing the suspended sentence, the court considered the three months Ballout was held in Lebanon and the six months he spent in pretrial detention. 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.”
Before traveling abroad, Ballout was convicted of assaulting someone at a Berlin high school in 2019 and stealing a pair of headphones from someone nearly a year later. He was convicted of assault and extortionate robbery in 2022, according to the prosecutor’s office.
Earlier this month, Berlin prosecutors reportedly searched Ballout’s home for firearms but found only a toy gun, and the case was dismissed.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz condemned the attack as a “heinous act” and an “attack on our society.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen expressed sympathy for the victims, saying the Christopher Street Day Pride celebration 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.
"I'm mainly exhausted at this point," Bosco says of the political attacks that have been lobbed against members of the transgender community. "It's just never-ending. It's just this deluge of hate that keeps on happening.
"But the thing with a lot of right-wing talking points is they pick a boogeyman or some sort of scapegoat and they change it about every ten years," the trans drag performer adds. "It's been trans people for a while, it's been Mexican people, it's been Black people, it's been any sort of 'other' that they can then manipulate people into being afraid of, and then they can blame all of the problems in the country on that one group of people. And right now trans people are taking the brunt of it."
Republicans are demanding investigations after Major League Baseball chastised Giants players for defacing Pride Night caps with a Bible verse reference.
Republicans and conservative critics are blasting Major League Baseball for warning three San Francisco Giants players who wrote a Bible verse reference on Pride Night caps worn during the team's June 12 game against the Chicago Cubs.
The Giants have the longest-running Pride celebration in Major League Baseball. According to MLB, the team hosted professional sports' first HIV/AIDS awareness game in 1994, launched its first official Pride Night in 2000, and became the first MLB team to incorporate the rainbow flag into on-field apparel in 2021.
An LGBTQ organizer suffered a black eye after a man struck her in the face with a flagpole at a Pride event in Cary, North Carolina.
Sara Buxton, owner of The Night Market Company, which curates open-air markets throughout North Carolina's Triangle region, was hosting the Alphabet Soup Pride Market at Downtown Cary Park on June 13.
In a video posted to Instagram, Buxton said the event had been successful until a shirtless man she described as an "agitator" began running through the crowd carrying an American flag on a metal flagpole.
Buxton said she asked the man to put on a shirt before re-entering the event. She alleges he responded by striking her in the face with the flagpole while hurling homophobic slurs.
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