BERLIN — A van ramming and stabbing near Berlin’s Pride festival that left one person dead and many others injured is believed to have been an Islamic extremist terror attack, Germany’s interior minister said Sunday.
The suspect in Saturday night’s attack remains at large. Authorities issued a wanted notice and warned people against approaching Abdul Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, saying that he may be armed and dangerous.
Authorities said he is believed to have injured several people after he drove a van into a crowd at a park near the Pride festival’s closing party. He then allegedly attacked other people with a weapon, suspected to be a machete.
“Everything we see here points to us dealing with an Islamic terror attack,” Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said.
Mr. Dobrindt put the total number of injured at 29.
German authorities have issued a wanted notice for the suspect, warning the public to avoid “direct contact” with the suspect and saying that he may be armed and dangerous.
Police had said earlier that they had identified a suspect who has ties to Islamic groups in the German capital.
Mr. Dobrindt said the suspect had come to authorities’ attention in the past because of numerous previous crimes, of which he didn’t give details, and also because of “radicalization and belonging to the Islamist scene.”
He said the suspect was born in Germany, and that his mother was naturalized in 2002 — three years before he was born.
Mr. Dobrindt said the suspect had been convicted in Berlin in the past, though he didn’t specify for what. He said that he had been given a suspended sentence of 1 year and 10 months.
Police conducted operations in the city as they searched for the suspect. Those included a search at an apartment in Berlin’s Schoneberg district in the early hours of Sunday, but police said they found no one there.
According to police, a white van drove into the Tiergarten park around 10 p.m. and hit several people before colliding with a tree. The closing party at the Pride festival, known as Christopher Street Day, was ongoing at the time next to the Brandenburg Gate, a short distance away, following a parade with some 80 trucks that had made its way through downtown Berlin earlier in the day.
Mr. Dobrindt noted that the crime scene was several hundred meters from the Pride festival itself, so the people affected would either have been in the Tiergarten park or on their way to or from the festival.
Police said a woman was killed. Berlin’s fire service said that three people sustained life-threatening injuries and another eight were seriously injured.
