German police shoot dead Berlin Pride attack suspect

**Will Chalk** (0:00)
This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Will Chalk, and in the early hours of Monday, the 27th of July, these are our main stories. German police have shot dead the man accused of carrying out a deadly attack at a pride event in Berlin. Wildfires in southwestern France are continuing to close in on Bordeaux. More than 300,000 people have been told to leave their homes in France and neighboring Spain. And we'll have a special report on the occupied West Bank, where attacks by Israeli settlers have continued.
Also in this podcast, the US ambassador to the United Nations says President Trump has paused attacks on Iran to give diplomacy more time and These glasses have led to different forms of stalking, matching a face to a name.

**Sarah Sasker** (0:49)
People have captured footage that they have then used for different forms of extortion.

**Will Chalk** (0:54)
Why celebrity-endorsed smart glasses are facing online backlash for being creepy and dystopian?
After one of the largest manhunts the German capital has seen in years, the suspect in the Berlin Pride attack has been shot dead by police. Abdul Ballout was tracked down to the western suburb of Spandau on Sunday. Police say he was carrying a knife when he was confronted by officers.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:23)
During the operation to apprehend him, he advanced on our officers while armed, was stopped by gunfire from our special operations unit and subsequently died. We will now conduct further investigations into the facts and the precise course of events.

**Will Chalk** (1:38)
Ballout was accused of killing a woman and injuring 29 other people on Saturday when he drove a van into a crowd at the Pride event before stabbing multiple people. People in the city's LGBT scene gave their reaction.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:53)
I'm still in shock. I've been to many large Pride events and given the incidents of recent years, we've often worried that one of our events might be targeted at some point.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:06)
The fact that this event is now overshadowed and will forever be linked to this day of death and mourning is of course a wound in the heart of the entire community.

**Will Chalk** (2:15)
We have since got more details. It's emerged that Ballout had tried to join the Islamic State group and he'd been ordered onto a de-radicalisation programme. We got more about the police operation from our correspondent Joe Inwood.

**Joe Inwood** (2:27)
So a rather unexpected location for this whole thing to come to an end at an allotment in a kind of a leafy suburb to the west of Berlin called Spandau. We haven't been given that much information about what led the police to locate the suspect there, but we understand that when they confronted him, he came at them with some sort of knife or bladed instrument. They haven't given us the specifics on that. And when he did that, they say the police special forces, one of them shot him dead. So it was a conclusion to the manhunt which ended in the suspect's death.

**Will Chalk** (3:00)
Yeah, that manhunt though, going on for well over 12 hours, that must have been a very anxious time for the people of Berlin.

**Joe Inwood** (3:08)
Yeah, it clearly was. I mean, there was real, real concern, obviously specifically amongst the LGBTQ plus community, those who are hosting the Christopher Street event. And when you listen to the testimony of those people, there is real, real sadness, anger, but fear, the idea that specifically their community has been targeted, I think has left people really worried. I mean, in terms of the time it's taken, about 15 hours or so, the police have said, we're pleased with that. There's been, I think it was the mayor and a few other people have said, they've praised the police response. I mean, obviously Berlin is a large city, it happened in the middle of the night. And so obviously tracking someone down like that is gonna be quite difficult. And I think obviously there's always concern when these things go on a little bit. But I think probably the feeling will be, and this is what the officials have said, that they've got their man and they've done it in quite a reasonable time.

**Will Chalk** (4:01)
What do we know then about the suspect himself and his motivations?

**Joe Inwood** (4:05)
Abdul Ballout was a 21-year-old German-born bird of Lebanese heritage. And it's been quite clear from his interaction with the police that he's someone that's been radicalised, interested in Islamist terrorism since 2024
Now, back then, he was, that's when he first, as far as we know, came into contact with the police because of Islamism. And that's when he started publishing stuff on Instagram about ISIS. He's then been found travelling to Lebanon via Turkey. And the police say that he wanted to join the Islamic State group. He was arrested at that point and sentenced to three months in prison. He then returned to Germany and was released, but then arrested at Brandenburg Airport. And we've basically seen at that point, he got given a one-year sentence, but that was commuted and he was supposed to go through a de-radicalisation programme. So I think in terms of the questions for the authorities, this is where those questions are going to come, rather than the time it took them to find him, but about the issues that maybe they missed in the lead up to this event. Because obviously he was someone that interacted with the state, he was someone they were aware of, but he clearly has managed to carry out this attack under their noses.