One person was killed and 29 injured in an attack on Saturday at a “gay pride” parade in Berlin — while the attacker, a supporter of the Islamic State terrorist group, spent a day on the run before being killed by police.
Abdul Ballout, 21, drove a van into a crowd at Berlin’s Christopher Street Gay Pride, then attacked more victims with a machete-like bladed weapon, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
He was killed on Sunday, after a full-scale manhunt the Daily Mail reported.
Police said the German-Lebanese terrorist “rushed towards our emergency forces with a stabbing weapon, after which police firearms were used by our SEK (Special Operations Command) Berlin,” according to the newspaper.
While the manhunt was still underway German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told reporters that Ballout “had previously drawn attention to himself through a high volume of criminal offences, radicalization and affiliation with the Islamist scene,” according to the U.K. Guardian.
Last year, Ballout, had been arrested after traveling to the Middle East in an attempt to join the Islamic State, according to the New York Post.
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Instead of reaching Syria, which had been his goal, he spent three months in a Lebanese prison after a conviction on a charge of incitement to religious and sectarian conflict.
He was arrested when he returned to Berlin.
In May, a juvenile court convicted Ballout of “preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state” and publishing Islamic State propaganda, the Post reported.
At that time, the court gave him a slap on the wrist by giving him a suspended sentence of a year and 10 months.
The court said Ballout’s detention in Germany and Lebanon was taken into account.
The court also decided to be lenient because Ballout never actually did anything criminal, confessed to what he had done, and appeared to put distance between himself and the Islamic State.
Prosecutors were appealing the lenient verdict, but Ballout was released while the appeal was pending.
That’s why he was free to commit the deadly attack.
Dobrindt said the suspect “rammed into a crowd with a car” and “then attacked the crowd with some type of blade, it might have been a machete, and also severely injured those people.”
Ballout was born in Germany in 2005 to a Lebanese family.
On July 3, police searched Ballout’s home in Berlin on suspicion that he violated the country’s Weapons Act, according to CBS.
Police found nothing more than a toy gun, CBS reported.
This article originally appeared on The Western Journal and is reposted with permission.
