German authorities launched a manhunt on Sunday to find a suspect who allegedly rammed a van into pedestrians near the Pride festival in Berlin, leaving at least one person dead and 16 others injured.
Event Context
Police and prosecutors asked for help in finding the 21-year-old suspect, whom they identified as Abdul B, news agency AFP reported. The authorities said he is believed to have injured several people with a moving vehicle late on Saturday evening, and that one or more people apparently then left that vehicle. Several people were also apparently stabbed.
Police had said earlier that they had identified a suspect who has ties to Islamic groups in the German capital. The wanted notice issued in the case warned the public to avoid “direct contact” with the suspect, saying that he may be armed and dangerous.
Match Outlook
The Pride event next to the Brandenburg Gate was called off around 10:15 pm. and a band’s performance on stage was interrupted. People were urged to go home and to avoid taking the route through the park.
Julian Miethig, who had attended the Pride festival, told AFP that he wanted to go to an after-party when he heard from a friend that “something bad happened there and there are a lot of fire trucks, a lot of emergency vehicles, ambulances.”
“It’s a dark day for the community,” he said.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz described what happened as “an attack on our society.”
“What an abhorrent act in Berlin,” Merz wrote in a post on X. He added that Germany loves freedom, “and we will preserve and defend that.”
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According to a Berlin police spokesperson, the suspect is known to the cops as a member of “Islamic circles in Berlin”.
“Our search for this person is proceeding at full speed,” police spokesperson Florian Nath said. He added that investigators had no information on his specific motives.
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 the police, a white van drove into the Tiergarten park around 10 pm on Saturday 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.
Hundreds of thousands of people had come to Berlin to celebrate on Saturday, though it’s unclear how many were still at the festival by late evening. It’s one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ celebrations.
Police said a woman was killed. Berlin’s fire service said that three people sustained life-threatening injuries, another eight were seriously injured, and five had slight injuries.
