The suspected Islamist terrorist who allegedly drove a van into crowds of people at the Berlin Pride Parade on Saturday has been shot and killed by police.
According to German daily Bild, the 21-year-old alleged ISIS-inspired terrorist, Abdul Ballut, was shot and killed during a SWAT team operation in the Spandau district of Berlin on Sunday.
This came after a manhunt was launched after a van was driven into revellers at Berlin’s Christopher Street Day Pride Parade, killing one and leaving 29 injured.
The paper reported that Special Task Force (SEK) police officers had come under attack from the suspect with a blade after he was discovered hiding in a garden shed. The officers returned fire, and the suspect reportedly died at 6:34 pm local time.
“Despite immediate resuscitation measures initiated by the Berlin Fire Department, he died at the scene,” a police spokesman confirmed.
Berlin’s Interior Senator Iris Spranger of the Social Democrats thanked the police and said, “I am grateful to the security authorities for finding the attacker so quickly. That is a great achievement.”
According to the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office, Abdul had made multiple attempts to join the so-called Islamic State while overseas, including in Lebanon, where he reportedly planned on journeying to Syria to join ISIS, Die Welt reported. While born in Germany in 2005, Abdul’s mother had immigrated to Germany from Lebanon in 2002.
While in Lebanon, he was sentenced to three months in prison for allegedly “inciting religious and sectarian conflicts.” Following his release from detention in Lebanon, he returned to Germany at the Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER). He had been held in juvenile detention for a sentence of one year and ten months. However, he was released in May while being ordered to attend de-radicalisation counselling.
Addressing reporters on Sunday ahead of the killing of the suspected terrorist, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said: “Our thoughts are with the victims of last night’s terrorist Islamist attack, with their families and friends, and I especially wish the injured a speedy recovery.”
“These criminals, these extremists, have no place in the heart of our society, and we will not allow this poison of terrorism and this poison against our freedom to spread further in our society, regardless of all partisan differences,” he said.
“We will defend the freedom of our society. Everyone can count on that. We are more numerous, we are stronger, and we stand together in our country. That is the most important thing in such a difficult hour… We will defend the freedom, the openness, the liberalism of our lives and our society with everything we can, and we will do it together.”
However, the government has come under criticism over the failure to meaningfully confront the issue of Islamist terrorism.
The chairman of the centre-right Free Democratic Party (FDP), Wolfgang Kubicki, said: “If, as a society, we repeatedly engage in the same discussions after such horrific acts without drawing the necessary conclusions, it demonstrates an almost unbearable helplessness on the part of our state.”
“One hundred per cent security is impossible – but there is the possibility of treating those who have declared themselves our enemies as such,” he said.
Kubicki noted that Islamism not only threatens Western freedom but also lives, saying that it is “currently the greatest danger to our free and democratic order and must finally be named and treated as such.”