German investigators have found a video on the mobile phone of the man who attacked Berlin’s Pride celebrations, in which a masked figure claims the attack and swears allegiance to Islamic State.
A spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor’s office confirmed the recording, first reported by Bild, was made on July 25, the day of the attack in the Tiergarten. The man in the clip speaks in Arabic and his face is covered.
The phone was recovered from the delivery van used in the attack, along with a machete sheath. The machete itself has not been found.
Der Spiegel reported that federal prosecutors were working on the assumption that the man in the video was Abdul Ballout, a 21-year-old German citizen of Lebanese background born in Berlin in 2005.
Ballout drove a white van into a crowd in the Tiergarten shortly before 10pm before attacking passers-by with a bladed weapon. A Polish woman who was visiting the city with her daughter was killed and 29 people were injured.
He was shot dead by police in an allotment complex in the Spandau district the following evening after running at officers carrying a blade.
The federal prosecutor’s office has taken over the investigation and is examining whether anyone else was involved. An Iranian man detained on the night of the attack was released without charge.
A juvenile court in the Tiergarten district sentenced Ballout on May 12 to one year and 10 months for preparing a serious act of violence endangering the State and for distributing Islamic State propaganda.
The written grounds of that judgment show the court found it could not be expected that he would commit no further offences. It ended his remand anyway under a deferred probation arrangement available only in juvenile law, on conditions including attendance at a deradicalisation programme.
Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR and WDR reported that state criminal police rated his risk potential as high and kept a camera trained on his front door. Some surveillance measures were eased after monitoring produced no concrete signs of an attack.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the target had not been chosen at random and that the attack was aimed at Germany’s free society rather than at the queer community alone. He said the country would “defend our freedom” and that expressions of sympathy would not be enough.
Interior minister Alexander Dobrindt has called for wider use of electronic tags on people classified as Gefährder, the German designation for those thought capable of politically motivated violence.
Christian Social Union (CSU) leader Markus Söder said such individuals should be tried under adult criminal law and that dual nationals among them should lose their German passports and be deported.
