Police shoot dead Berlin Pride van and knife rampage suspect, officials say

 

Germany

Police shoot dead Berlin Pride van and knife rampage suspect, officials say

 

Abdul Ballout, 21, reportedly shot in operation at allotment in Spandau district after fatal attack in Tiergarten park

 

Deborah Cole in Berlin and Jennifer Rankin

Sun 26 Jul 2026 18.53 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/26/berlin-pride-van-knife-rampage-islamist-terrorist-attack-germany

 

A man suspected of driving a van into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride festival then going on a knife rampage in an Islamist terror attack has been shot dead by police, German officials have said.

 

Police confirmed on Sunday evening that the chief suspect had been shot dead, reportedly during an operation at an allotment garden complex ⁠in the capital’s Spandau district.

 

One woman was killed on Saturday evening and 29 others were injured after a man drove a rented minivan into a crowd of pedestrians, then attacked people with what appeared to be a machete. The attack took place in the Tiergarten park near the Brandenburg Gate at about 10pm local time on Saturday, close to one of Europe’s biggest LGBTQ+ celebrations.

 

The attack forced organisers to cut short one of Europe’s largest Pride events and came as Germany remained on edge after a series of deadly vehicle and knife attacks.

 

 

The German interior minister, Alexander Dobrindt, named the chief suspect as 21-year-old Abdul Ballout. “We are dealing ​here with ‌a suspected ‌perpetrator, who had previously drawn attention ‌to himself through a high volume of criminal offences, radicalisation and affiliation with the Islamist scene,” he told ‌a press conference near the site of the attack. He said Ballout had a criminal conviction and had been sentenced as a juvenile to a year and 10 months in prison, but that the sentence had been suspended.

 

German media reported that Ballout, a German national with Lebanese roots, was a supporter of Islamic State and last year travelled to the Middle East in a failed attempt to join the group. He was then convicted in Germany of “preparing a serious act of subversive violence”, the news outlets Bild and Der Spiegel reported.

 

Police and prosecutors had asked for help in finding Ballout, but warned the public to avoid “direct contact” with him, saying he may be armed and dangerous. Police searched an apartment in the Schöneberg district of Berlin near the scene of the attack in the early hours of Sunday, but said they had found no one there.

 

Before Ballout was shot, Der Spiegel spoke with his father, Tawfik, by telephone from Lebanon, where he was visiting relatives.

 

Describing Ballout as “generous, emotional, loving”, he said his son had lived with his mother, from whom Tawfik is divorced, and two of his three sisters. Ballout attended school until 10th grade, then bounced from job to job, in security or as a driver.

 

Tawfik described the family as Shia but “not extremely religious” and said it “does not support Islamic State”, an extremist Sunni group.

 

He and Ballout had fought about his hair and beard. “I did not allow him to wear a long beard,” he told Spiegel, calling it a symbol of extremism. Asked about a possible motive for the attack, he said: “He was brainwashed.”

 

Tawfik spoke with Ballout on Saturday, the day of the attack. “He called me and we spoke normally, like every day. He said he missed me and wished he was with us in Lebanon.”

 

The chancellor, Friedrich Merz, urged Germany to avoid division and intimidation in the aftermath of the attack. “We ​will think ​about ​consequences, we ​will ‌defend ​our freedom,” he said in a news conference.

 

Earlier, Merz vowed to punish those responsible, describing the “heinous act” as an “attack on our society” in a social media post. The flag at the German Bundestag was ordered to be lowered to half mast.

 

Police said the vehicle had struck multiple ⁠people after being driven into the Tiergarten. Shortly before 10pm the driver of the white minivan swerved into the park, close to where the route of the Pride march had been earlier in the day, hitting people on a path and crashing into a tree.

 

Bild cited a witness as saying that a man had emerged from the vehicle and fled on foot. A hunt involving helicopters and officers from several German states was under way across the capital on Sunday.

 

Julian Methig, who attended the event, described it as a nightmare come true. “It’s one of the worst days for the queer community and a day I personally hoped I’d never have to experience … I’m shocked,” he said.

 

Hundreds of thousands of people had gathered in Berlin in warm summer sunshine to celebrate the Pride parade. It is known in Germany as Christopher Street Day (CSD), named after the site of the Stonewall Inn in New York City where riots against police raids touched off the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. CSD was first held in West Berlin in 1979.

 

Berlin’s mayor, Kai Wegner, called the deadly assault “an attack on our free and cosmopolitan society”.

 

“Following a peaceful and colourful CSD, the rally for a tolerant and peaceful Berlin was attacked in the most brutal manner,” he said on X. “Berlin is the city of freedom – and our freedom has today been attacked in the most appalling way. My thoughts are with the victims, their families and friends.”

 

For the first time in its history, CSD began on Friday night this year with a pro-democracy political rally. Berlin will hold a regional election in September along with two other states.

 

The parade on Saturday ran under the motto “taking a stand is hot”, which organisers said was “in response to increasing hostility” to LGBTQ+ people in Germany.

 

More than 80 floats and 50 groups on foot joined the procession through the city centre past Potsdamer Platz and the Victory Column monument in the Tiergarten, culminating in a rally at the Brandenburg Gate.

 

Emergency personnel and police gather in Berlin. Photograph: Ebrahim Noroozi/AP

 

Earlier in the day one person was arrested for resisting police orders at a far-right counterprotest.

 

Before last year’s parade, Berlin LGBTQ+ organisations sounded the alarm that attacks had become more frequent while hard-won rights were under threat. Campaigners said a rise in hostility had accompanied the surge in support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), now the most popular party in national opinion polls, as well as an increase in Islamist-inspired attacks.

 

European leaders offered solidarity, including heads of government in Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden. “Italy firmly condemns and opposes all forms of hate and extremism,” the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, wrote on X, adding: “We stand with Germany and the German people.” The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said: “Faced with hatred and violence, our response will always be unity, freedom, and resolve.”

 

The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, a German centre-right politician allied with Merz, sent her deepest sympathy to the victims of the attack, describing the CSD parade as standing for “freedom, dignity and equality – the fundamental values of the EU”.

 

Britain’s foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, said he was “horrified by the appalling attack in Berlin” and had spoken to his counterpart, Johann Wadephul, “to convey the UK’s solidarity: we stand with Germany”.

 

Far-right leaders were also quick to comment on the attacks. The co-leader of the AfD Tino Chrupalla wrote on X: “We will not allow religious extremists to divide our country with violence and intolerance!”

 

The president of France’s far-right National Rally, Jordan Bardella, wrote: “The Islamist threat remains a major issue in Europe and continues to target what they hate most about our civilisation – and what we cherish so much – freedom.”

6 years ago: Sir Roger Scruton | Full Address and Q&A | Oxford Union

Published Jan. 16, 2020 : Roger Scruton, a Provocative Public Intellectual, Dies at 75

 

Roger Scruton, a Provocative Public Intellectual, Dies at 75

 

A philosopher, author and columnist, he was an outspoken hero to conservatives in Britain and recently at the center of, in his words, a “hate storm.”

 

By Alan Cowell

Published Jan. 16, 2020

Updated Jan. 17, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/books/roger-scruton-dead.html

 

LONDON — Roger Scruton, a prominent British philosopher and public intellectual whose espousal of conservative causes and contentious views elicited both plaudits and opprobrium, which he likened to “falling to the bottom in my own country,” died on Sunday. He was 75.

 

His family announced the death on his website without providing other details. Mr. Scruton, who lived for many years on a farm in Wiltshire, in southwest England, was said to have been treated for lung cancer in recent months.

 

In the course of a long academic career, which included spells in the United States, Mr. Scruton wrote more than 50 books, ranging over topics like art, aesthetics, architecture, music, philosophy and sexual behavior. On the defining issue of the new century in Britain, he said, he voted in favor of leaving the European Union, the so-called Brexit that propelled the Conservative Party’s landslide victory in elections in December.

 

He also wrote four novels in addition to newspaper and magazine columns, in which he mused on wine, politics and horseback hunting, which he pursued enthusiastically until his final birthday. As a musician, he composed operas. He qualified as a barrister, too, but did not practice law.

 

In the Cold War years of the late 1970s and ’80s, he transcended the frontiers of formal Western academia by traveling beyond the Iron Curtain — to Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia — to deliver clandestine lectures and smuggle samizdat works disguised as blank CDs to Soviet bloc students. In later years he was awarded medals in recognition of that role.

 

He was knighted in Britain in 2016. After his death, Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted, “We have lost the greatest modern conservative thinker — who not only had the guts to say what he thought but said it beautifully.”

 

Toward the end of his life, Mr. Scruton concluded that he had been treated unfairly in his own land, subjected to what he termed a “hate storm” inspired by critics who had accused him of Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and disparagement of Chinese people — allegations that Mr. Scruton called “fantastic and fabricated.”

 

The immediate cause of the furor was an article about him in April in the left-wing magazine New Statesman. Based on an interview with him, the article, which a New Statesman editor said on social media contained “a series of outrageous remarks,” prompted an uproar. Mr. Scruton was said to have belittled the term Islamophobia, spoken stereotypically of Chinese people and evoked a “Soros empire in Hungary,” referring to the financier George Soros, who is Jewish.

 

Within hours of its publication Mr. Scruton was sacked from an unsalaried position he had held as the head of a government-appointed body that advised on modern architecture, the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.

 

But he was reappointed after the magazine acknowledged that his views “were not accurately represented in the tweets” that had been published along with the article. The magazine apologized.

 

The episode recalled Mr. Scruton’s longstanding reputation as an iconoclast. Peter Stothard, who had been his editor at The Times of London in the 1980s, when Mr. Scruton wrote a column for the paper on art and politics, was quoted as saying that “there was no one I ever commissioned to write whose articles provoked more rage” than Mr. Scruton’s.

 

Critics also assailed his views on homosexuality and gender issues. In his interview with New Statesman, he said that homosexuality was “different” but denied that he was homophobic. He described the 21st-century debate on gender and identity as “a kind of theatrical obsession which is being imposed on children whether or not they understand it.”

 

Mr. Scruton dated his conversion to the conservative cause to the Paris student riots of 1968, when, at 24, he observed young people, including his friends, clashing with the police in the Latin Quarter. “What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans,” he said in an interview with The Guardian in 2000.

 

“When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledygook,” he continued. “I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defense of western civilization against these things. That’s when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down.”

 

Roger Vernon Scruton was born in Buslingthorpe, a village in Lincolnshire, in eastern England, on Feb. 7, 1944, the son of John and Beryl (Claris) Scruton. His father was a teacher, his mother a homemaker. The couple also had two daughters.

 

Roger was educated at a grammar school in High Wycombe, West London, and won a scholarship to Jesus College at Cambridge University, where he studied philosophy. He met his future first wife, Danielle Laffitte, a teacher, while traveling in France. They married in 1973, the same year he was awarded his doctorate. They divorced in 1979.

 

From 1971 to 1992 he taught at Birkbeck College in London, where, he said, he was the only conservative on the teaching staff.

 

In later years he was sometimes depicted as providing the intellectual spine to Thatcherism in Britain, although he said he did not share Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s devotion to the free market.

 

In 1982, Mr. Scruton helped found a conservative journal, The Salisbury Review, which stirred controversy in 1984 by publishing an article by a headmaster in the north of England who raised questions about the value of multicultural education.

 

Mr. Scruton published a torrent of books, including “Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of the Mind” (1974), “The Aesthetics of Architecture” (1979) and “Sexual Desire” (1986). His novels included “Notes From Underground” (2014), based on his experiences behind the Iron Curtain.

 

In 1992 he became a professor of philosophy at Boston University; he returned to Britain in 1995. In 1996 he married Sophie Jeffreys, an architectural historian, with whom he had two children, Sam and Lucy. They all survive him.

 

The episode revolving around the New Statesman article, in the last year of his life, left Mr. Scruton feeling bruised.

 

In a column in the conservative magazine Spectator, under the headline “Roger Scruton: My 2019,” he wrote, “During this year much was taken from me — my reputation, my standing as a public intellectual, my position in the Conservative movement, my peace of mind, my health.”

 

But, he went on, “Falling to the bottom in my own country, I have been raised to the top elsewhere, and looking back over the sequence of events I can only be glad that I have lived long enough to see this happen.”

 

“Coming close to death you begin to know what life means,” he added, “and what it means is gratitude.”

 

After a long career as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times based in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, Alan Cowell became a freelance contributor in 2015, based in London.

 

  More about Alan Cowell

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The Age of Sacred Terror by Daniel Benjamin , Steven Simon

 

The Age of Sacred Terror

by Daniel Benjamin (Author), Steven Simon (Author)  Format: Hardcover

 

Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon began working on this book shortly after leaving the National Security Council, where, as director and senior director for counterterrorism, they watched the rise of al-Qaeda and helped coordinate America’s fight against Usama bin Laden and his organization. They warned in articles and interviews about the appearance of a new breed of terrorists who were determined to kill on the grand scale. More than a year before September 11, 2001, they began writing The Age of Sacred Terror to sound the alarm for a nation that had not recognized the gravest threat of our time.

 

One of their book’s original goals has remained: to provide the insights to understand an enemy unlike any seen in living memory—one with an extraordinary ability to detect weakness and exploit it, one with a determination to inflict catastrophic damage, one that will not be deterred. But after September 11, a second, equally crucial goal was added: to understand how America let its defenses down, how warnings went unheeded, and how key parts of the government failed at vital tasks. The Age of Sacred Terror also describes the road ahead, where the terrorists will look to draw strength, and what the United States must do, at home and abroad, to stop them. For a year after the attacks that redefined terrorism and devastated the public’s sense of security, America has been searching for answers about those responsible for one of the darkest days in our history and explanations for the glaring gaps in our defenses. The Age of Sacred Terror provides both, with unique authority. It is the book that Americans must read to understand the foremost challenge we face.