A car plowed through a park during Berlin’s biggest gay Pride event on Saturday, killing at least one person and injuring 29 others, the authorities said.
After an 18-hour manhunt, the police shot and killed a 21-year-old man whom they called the prime suspect. He had tried to join ISIS and was sentenced for preparing a serious act of violence but was released from detention in May.
What happened in the attack?
Crowds had gathered on Saturday in the Tiergarten, a large park in central Berlin, to celebrate the city’s annual L.G.B.T.Q. Pride festival, one of the biggest such events in Europe.
Around 10 p.m., a man in a white minivan sped down a side street leading out of the park and hit several people with the vehicle, the authorities said. The police said some revelers had stab wounds.
The van was found abandoned where it had crashed into a tree. The officials said that the attacker had also wielded what appeared to be a machete.
German officials have said that the attack was an act of Islamist terrorism.
Who are the victims?
One woman was killed and 29 others were injured, many of them critically, the police said. No details have been released about the victims.
Who is the suspect?
The police identified the suspect only as Abdul B., in keeping with German privacy laws, and said that he was a 21-year-old German citizen whose family members migrated from Lebanon.
He was known to law enforcement and active in local Islamist groups, the authorities said.
On Sunday night, prosecutors said that Abdul B. had traveled to Lebanon and had planned to cross into Syria to join the Islamic State in May 2025. In July, he was arrested in Lebanon and served three months in prison there for offenses including incitement to religious and sectarian conflict.
When he returned to Germany in November, he was arrested at Berlin Brandenburg Airport and then spent six more months in pretrial detention.
In May, a German juvenile court handed him a suspended sentence on probation. It noted that he had already served about nine months in detention in Germany and Lebanon, largely confessed during his trial and distanced himself from ISIS. Berlin prosecutors filed an appeal and requested a longer sentence.
The revelations that Abdul B. was known to the authorities and released just a few months ago have prompted a heated debate in Germany over whether terrorism laws need to be tightened.
How did the police find the suspect?
The authorities began a sweeping manhunt to find the suspect, scouring Berlin as well as the country’s train stations, airports and border crossings.
The German police said they had tracked the suspect to an area in the west of the city, where residents maintain large garden patches.
The police said officers fired on the suspect after he charged at them with a weapon. Emergency responders tried to revive him, but he died at the scene, the police said.
What have German officials said?
Officials expressed grief and outrage at the attack.
“This is an attack on our society,” Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, wrote on social media.
“Berlin is the city of freedom — and our freedom has been horribly attacked today,” Kai Wegner, Berlin’s mayor, said in a statement.
The attack has also intensified a debate in Germany about migration, religious extremism and public safety.
In the next few months, Berlin and two other eastern states are set to hold closely watched regional elections. Polls suggest that far-right parties are poised to make gains, partly because of Germans’ anxieties over public violence.
