What do we know about the Islamist attack in Berlin?

Berlin. Following a manhunt lasting over 20 hours, the jihadist Abdul Ballout was killed in the Spandau district during a confrontation with German police special forces in an allotment garden area. The man was accused of the terrorist attack on the capital’s Christopher Street Day Pride event, in which one woman died and 29 people were injured. Shortly before 10 pm on Saturday, Ballout drove a van into Tiergarten park on Lennéstraße and ploughed into the crowd along Ahornsteig. After getting out of the vehicle, the attacker is reported to have also attacked several people with a bladed weapon, probably a machete. The man then fled the scene. “An attack on our society,” said Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who went on to add: “There are more of us, we are stronger, we stand united.” Unlike on other occasions, the German police were very quick to identify the Islamist nature of the attack, publishing a photo of Ballout within a few hours. The 21-year-old was by no means unknown to the authorities: with a criminal record for common offences, he was also classified as an Islamist “Gefährder” (dangerous individual) and had reportedly been under surveillance for some time. This scenario is causing considerable embarrassment and brings back memories of the underestimation of Anis Amri, the terrorist behind the 2016 attack on the Berlin Christmas market. Ballout, a German citizen of Lebanese origin, is said to have attempted last year to travel to Syria to join ISIS. Stopped in Lebanon, he was returned to Germany and arrested. In May 2026, a youth court sentenced him to one year and ten months for preparing a terrorist offence, though the sentence was subsequently suspended. The young man was released on condition that he attend 26 deradicalisation sessions. Just today, Monday, Ballout was due to attend his third session. According to reports, the man’s case was even discussed at the GTaz (Joint Counter-Terrorism Centre) in Berlin. These details make it even harder to explain how the jihadist nevertheless managed to obtain a van and get close to a parade that has long been at the top of the list of high-risk targets.

Part of the German LGBTQ community has always been much more politically focused on the dangers posed by the far right, whilst remaining more cautious in addressing the Islamist threat. However, reports from the federal intelligence service (BfV) and local intelligence services (LfV) have for years indicated that, even in Germany, the queer community is a primary target of jihadist violence. In its magazines "Dabiq" and "Rumiyah", ISIS has explicitly incited attacks against the LGBTQ community in the West. Not only that: the German-speaking world has already witnessed direct precedents. In Vienna, in 2023, ISIS sympathisers were arrested just a few hours before the Regenbogenparade because, according to the Austrian intelligence service DSN, they intended to carry out an attack using “knives or vehicles”. In 2025, Christopher Street Day itself was cancelled in Gelsenkirchen due to an Islamist threat. The first jihadist attack in Germany targeting homosexuals took place even earlier, in Dresden in 2020, when a Syrian Islamist (another ‘Gefährder’, released from prison just a few days earlier) stabbed a gay couple, killing one of the two men.

Saturday evening’s attack on Berlin Pride took place just a few hundred metres from the Holocaust Memorial, where in February 2025 another radical Islamist attacked a Spanish tourist, this time for anti-Semitic reasons. For years, radical Islamism has been at the top of the list of threats to German security. A wave of attacks began in May 2024 with the Mannheim stabbing, which claimed the life of a police officer. This was followed by the attack in Solingen, which left three people dead and was claimed by ISIS. In 2025, there were also attacks in Munich, Bielefeld and Essen. In its latest report, the BfV identified 28,645 radical Islamists in Germany, of whom 9,110 are directly oriented towards violence. These are not just immigrants – quite the contrary. German jihadism is increasingly a phenomenon amongst young and very young people born in Germany to foreign parents and radicalised online by so-called TikTok preachers or in the most extreme Salafist mosques. It is precisely this trend that makes the Islamist threat in Germany a phenomenon that is expanding and accelerating.