The suspect in the deadly Berlin Pride attack previously sought to join the Islamic State group, German prosecutors said on Sunday, July 26, 2026.

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.

He is suspected of driving a van into a crowd near the Pride’s closing concert on Saturday night, killing a woman and injuring others, before stabbing more people.

German investigators were searching Sunday for a man suspected of driving a van into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride festival, killing one person and injuring several people before apparently stabbing others with a machete in what authorities believe was an Islamic extremist terror attack.

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.

“Everything we see here points to us dealing with an Islamic terror attack,” Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said.

Dobrindt put the total number of wounded at 29.

The attack occurred a few hundred meters (yards) from a party near the Brandenburg Gate that was supposed to close out the city’s Pride festival.

Ashley Jump, a 26-year-old U.K. resident, had traveled to Berlin for Saturday’s Pride parade but had left the celebrations before the attack.

They returned Sunday to leave flowers at a memorial near the crime scene in support of the LGBTQ+ community.

“They’ll never erase us, we’ll never be gone,” they said. “As long as humanity has existed, we’ve existed. And as long as humanity exists, we will exist. We will not be removed.”

Person of interest allegedly has ties to Islamic extremism

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” in the German capital.

He said Ballout was born in Germany, and that his mother was naturalized in 2002, three years before he was born.

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 person of interest.

Those included a search at an apartment in Berlin’s Schöneberg district in the early hours of Sunday, but police said they found no one there.