By Markus Wacket, Miranda Murray and Kirsti Knolle
BERLIN, July 26 (Reuters) – Germany pledged to bring to justice those responsible for Saturday night’s deadly crowd-ramming near a Pride event in Berlin, calling it a terrorist attack and identifying the suspect as a known Islamist militant sympathiser.
A white minivan ploughed into pedestrians in the Tiergarten park near the Brandenburg Gate at about 10 p.m. (2000 GMT), not far from one of Europe’s biggest annual LGBTQ Pride celebrations, Christopher Street Day. One person was killed and 29 injured, eight seriously, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said.
“Everything we see here indicates that we are dealing with an Islamist terrorist attack,” he told journalists in Berlin.
The suspected perpetrator had “attracted attention in the past through a high degree of criminal offences, through radicalisation, through membership of the Islamist scene”, Dobrindt said, adding that he had a Lebanese background and was born in Germany in 2005.
SUSPECT WAS A KNOWN ISLAMIST, POLICE SAY
Berlin police said overnight they had identified a suspect, naming him as Abdul B and publishing his picture.
They asked the public to help find him, describing him as slim, around 1.90 m (6 foot 2 inches) tall, with black hair, and last seen wearing a black hooded top and white trousers.
But they also warned people not to approach him, saying he was “possibly armed and dangerous”.
Security sources told Reuters that the suspect had been released from juvenile detention only two months ago.
They said he had sought contact with the Islamic State militant group, that he was known to domestic intelligence and was among the hundreds of people classed as potentially dangerous, a label that usually leads to scrutiny or monitoring.
Of the 29 people who were wounded in Berlin, some suffered stab wounds, Dobrindt said. The fire service said three of the injured were in a life-threatening condition.
Christopher Street Day organisers cancelled the remainder of the events.
Much about the incident remained unclear, including whether the perpetrator acted alone, since police said more than one person may have got out of the van.
Reuters TV footage from the scene on Sunday morning showed a white minivan crumpled into a tree. The mass-circulation newspaper Bild said it was a Citroen delivery vehicle that Abdul B had rented, adding that police had searched his apartment.
MERZ GOVERNMENT UNDER PRESSURE BEFORE ELECTIONS
The attack comes at a sensitive time for conservative chancellor Friedrich Merz’s unpopular coalition government, which is going through a bruising cabinet reshuffle as critics accuse it of being ineffective.
State elections take place in two months, with the far-right opposition party Alternative for Germany (AfD) campaigning on issues including immigration and security in a bid to secure leadership of a regional government for the first time.
The AfD was quick to comment on the attack.
“We will not allow religious extremists to divide our country with violence and intolerance!” AfD co-chief Tino Chrupalla said on X.
Germany has experienced a series of vehicle attacks on crowds in recent years.
In May, a man believed to have mental health issues drove into a pedestrian zone in Leipzig, killing two people and seriously injuring three.
In 2016, Anis Amri, a Tunisian failed asylum seeker with links to Islamist militants, hijacked a truck, killed its driver and drove it into a busy Christmas market, killing 11 people and injuring dozens. He was shot dead by police in Italy four days later.
(Reporting by Miranda Murray, Kirsti Knolle, Markus Wacket and Leon Malherbe in Berlin;Writing by Francois Murphy;Editing by Helen Popper and Kevin Liffey)
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