German investigators find apparent motive after Berlin Pride attack

Prosecutors say they uncover video of accused Berlin Pride attacker pledging allegiance to ISIL (ISIS).

German authorities say the suspect in this past weekend’s lethal Berlin Pride attack had pledged allegiance to the ISIL (ISIS) armed group in a video.

The German federal prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday that investigators found the video on a phone that was in the rented minivan used to drive into a crowd of people at the festival on Saturday.

The 21-year-old suspect, Abdul Ballout, was shot dead by police on Sunday. Officials said he had attacked officers with a bladed weapon.

The video that police found was recorded on Saturday, the day of the attack that killed a 65-year-old Polish woman and injured 31 people.

The person in the video was masked, but Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said in televised comments, “We assume the person in the video is the suspect.”

Investigators were “in the process of accessing and analysing the mobile phone found in the vehicle”, he said, adding that “links to IS can also be found” on data storage devices found in Ballout’s home.

Alongside the phone in the van was a sheath for the machete the attacker is thought to have used to attack more people after leaving the vehicle after it crashed into a tree in central Berlin’s Tiergarten park, the German newspaper Bild, which first reported the video, said.

Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, was known to the criminal justice system.

Berlin prosecutors said Ballout travelled to Lebanon in 2025 with the goal of going to Syria to join ISIL. He made contact with several people who were presumed members.

A Lebanese judicial source told the AFP news agency that Ballout was sentenced to three months in jail there for belonging to ISIL.

He was detained on his return to Germany and in May was convicted by a juvenile court of “planning a serious act of subversive violence” and given a suspended jail sentence of one year and 10 months.