Berlin, July 26 (dpa/GNA) – A nationwide manhunt following a suspected Islamist terrorist attack on Berlin’s massive Pride celebration, has ended with police shooting dead the chief suspect, after a tactical team located him in an allotment garden in the outskirts of the city.
Police said they opened fire on the suspect in the Saturday van-ramming and knife attack, after he lunged at police officers with a “bladed weapon.” Despite resuscitation efforts by medics from the fire brigade, the man died at the scene in the suburb of Spandau, west of the Pride parade attack site.
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said officials did not anticipate any further danger. Police spokesman Florian Nath had earlier said, “Our working hypothesis remains that there may be more than one suspect.”
Germany has seen several vehicle ramming attacks in the past years, though many have not been political in nature. The latest such attack comes almost a decade after an Islamist drove a truck onto a crowded Christmas market, killing 12 people before fleeing and later being shot by police.
The van-ramming attack targeting Berlin’s Pride celebration, among Europe’s largest and attended by hundreds of thousands, left one woman dead and 29 people injured, some seriously.
The suspected attacker, who had also attacked participants with a machete, was already known to authorities and involved in a “high level of criminal activity,” Dobrindt said at a press conference.
The suspect, who was born in Berlin in 2005 after his Lebanese-born mother became a German citizen in 2002, is believed to have been radicalized and to have been part of an Islamist milieu, based on initial findings, Dobrindt said. The suspect had previously been given a suspended sentence of one year and ten months.
The public prosecutor’s office had lodged an appeal against this, the minister said. A “major deployment of forces” had been ordered as part of the manhunt, with additional police deployed not only to Berlin, but also at railway stations and airports throughout Germany, as well as at borders.
Police had issued a wanted notice describing the man. At around 10 pm (2000 GMT) on Saturday, a white van struck several people at the edge of the Pride event in Berlin’s central Tiergarten park, prompting organizers to call off the celebrations and evacuate the area.
Police spokesman Florian Nath said the victim killed was a woman, who suffered fatal injuries at the scene. The vehicle crashed into a tree and the suspect fled. Officers no longer believed he was in the area and said he was likely elsewhere in Berlin.
According to witness accounts, several people may have suffered stab wounds, while some said they had seen a man dressed in black carrying a machete. Police said by Sunday afternoon, none of those injured remained in a life-threatening condition.
The attack comes two months before Berlin votes in state elections. Observers say that Saturday’s attack could boost the hard-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is leading in polls in Berlin, as well as in two other states voting this year – Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Saxony-Anhalt.
Within hours, politicians began proposing policy responses. The AfD’s Berlin branch blamed what it described as Germany’s failed migration policy, and accused previous governments of being too lenient towards violent Islamists.
Meanwhile, interior affairs politician Günter Krings of Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), called for longer prison sentences for Islamist terrorists, stricter citizenship rules and broader use of preventive detention and deportation measures.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, earlier visited and laid flowers at the scene of the attack, after attending a memorial service. Merz called on people not to be intimidated and divided by the attack. “These acts have only one purpose, they want to divide our society, they want to take from us the most important thing we have, namely our openness and our freedom,” Merz said.
GNA