German authorities criticised over presumed Pride attacker

Abdul Ballout, 21, drove van into crowd near Berlin Pride, then used machete. Police shot him dead Sunday after manhunt. German law enforcement authorities faced criticism Monday for failing to prevent a deadly vehicle and machete attack near Berlin’s Pride parade, with the far-right AfD demanding tougher action against Islamists. Politicians, security experts and a police union asked why the presumed attacker, Abdul Ballout, 21 — who was shot dead by police on Sunday after approaching them with a bladed weapon — was walking free and not under close surveillance after previous convictions and an attempt to join the so-called Islamic State group. “The danger from this man was underestimated,” Rolf Tophoven of the Institute for Terrorism Research and Security Policy told AFP. The attacker on Saturday evening ploughed a rented minivan into a crowd before slashing away at people with a machete, killing a Polish woman and wounding 29 others, at the edge of Berlin’s Tiergarten park where a large LGBTQ community event was being held. After a city-wide manhunt, police shot dead Ballout on Sunday evening in an allotment complex in the capital’s western Spandau district. Prosecutors said Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, had previous convictions for causing bodily harm, extortion and robbery and had attempted to join the IS group in Syria. The attack comes two months before Berliners elect a new assembly for the city-state, with some polls predicting the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) could emerge as the biggest party in a crowded field. In an X post, the AfD’s co-leader, Alice Weidel, accused Chancellor Friedrich Merz of insufficient action against “migrant violence” and said her party was “ready to act”. Merz himself said on Monday that it was “too early to say what political conclusions we will draw from this brutal attack, but it is clear that we will have to go beyond just announcements”. “We will have to answer the question of how it is that a man with this profile could get close (to the parade) unhindered and commit this sort of attack,” he told a press conference. ‘Fatal mistake’ Ballout had last year travelled to Lebanon in a failed attempt to join the IS group in Syria but was arrested and spent three months in jail in Lebanon before his repatriation. Most recently he was convicted in May of “planning a serious act of subversive violence” and given a jail sentence of one year and 10 months. However the sentence was suspended, partially in recognition of the time he had already spent in jail in Lebanon and his pre-trial detention, and because he had admitted to the crimes and claimed to have distanced himself from IS. Tophoven, the security expert, pointed out that prosecutors had appealed against the sentence suspension and that it was meant to be subject to certain conditions, such as Ballout attending a de-radicalisation programme. “It was known that he was an Islamist, and the tragedy is precisely that everything was known”, he said, deploring the “fatal mistake” to let him walk free. Lawmaker Marc Henrichmann from Merz’s centre-right CDU, who chairs the parliamentary committee supervising intelligence agencies, said that tougher measures were necessary in such cases. “The freedoms of extremists and Islamists must not be given undue value, especially when people’s lives are at risk,” he told the Handelsblatt newspaper. The head of Germany’s police officers’ association, Dirk Peglow, also charged that the justice system had been too lax with Ballout. “With people who pose such a threat, the end of their time in detention must not be the end of state supervision,” he said, speaking to the same business daily. Speaking on radio station Deutschlandfunk, Guner Balci — the integration commissioner for Berlin’s Neukoelln district, home to a large Muslim population — called for the closure of the most radical mosques “to send a clear signal”.