German officials questioned over why a convicted Islamist was released before deadly Pride parade attack in Berlin.
BERLIN: German authorities faced tough questions Monday over why a man blamed for a deadly attack near Berlin’s Pride parade was at large despite his Islamist radicalisation and recent conviction for “preparing an act of violence”.
Abdul Ballout, 21, is believed to have ploughed a rented minivan into a crowd Saturday at the edge of Berlin’s Tiergarten park before attacking people with a machete, killing one woman and wounding 29.
After a city-wide manhunt, police shot dead Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, on Sunday evening in an allotment complex in the capital’s western Spandau district.
Prosecutors said Ballout had long been known to the justice system and had previous convictions for causing bodily harm, extortion and robbery.
He had also travelled to Lebanon in a failed attempt to join the Islamic State group in Syria but was arrested and spent three months in jail in Lebanon before his repatriation.
Most recently he was convicted in May of “planning a serious act of subversive violence” and given a jail sentence of one year and 10 months in jail.
However the sentence was suspended, partially in recognition of the time he had already spent in jail in Lebanon and his pre-trial detention, and because he had admitted to the crimes and claimed to have distanced himself from IS.
Marc Henrichmann, a lawmaker from Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s centre-right CDU who chairs the parliamentary committee supervising intelligence agencies, said that tougher measures were necessary in such cases.
“The freedoms of extremists and Islamists must not be given undue value, especially when people’s lives are at risk,” he told the Handelsblatt newspaper.
The head of Germany’s police officers’ association, Dirk Peglow, also charged that the justice system had been too lax with Ballout.
“With people who pose such a threat, the end of their time in detention must not be the end of state supervision,” he said, speaking to the same business daily.
The interior minister in the southern state of Bavaria Joachim Herrmann meanwhile labelled the decision to suspend Ballout’s sentence “catastrophic”.
“The judges who have to take such decisions must know the responsibility they have for people’s security,” he told public broadcaster BR.
