Berlin Pride attack suspect killed during police operation

0:03Hello, welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. For this, we are coming to you live from London. I'm Paul Henley. In Germany, police say the man suspected of having carried out an attack on Berlin's Pride event has been shot dead by their officers. Abdul Balut, who was 21 and whose photo had been released to the media, had been tracked down to allotments in the Berlin suburb of Spandau. The police say he'd rushed towards them with what they called a stabbing weapon. Balut had been previously ordered onto a de-radicalisation programme after he tried to join the Islamic State Group, and the authorities say all the indicators are that the attack late yesterday night was an act of Islamist terrorism.

0:47One woman was killed and 29 people were injured when the suspect rammed a van into a crowd and then began to stab people. Daniel Tanar Leyva was at the event. He told the BBC what he saw. I was right in front of the main stage waiting for my favorite acts to perform when the evacuation started. Like nobody knew what was happening, but as soon as they went on stage and said that, I immediately knew something really bad happened. It was really difficult because you don't know. like you of course start to you try to open your phone to open the news but it was all so fast like there was no news about it you just see tons of blue lights helicopters all over the city you don't know where to go you don't know if you're safe they say just leave the area go home but where?

1:51And like 10, 20 minutes later, the first news come in, but it was all like a lot. Crowds of people, many carrying rainbow flags, have been gathering today at the Brandenburg Gate near the scene of the attack to honour victims of what happened and to oppose any attempts by the far right to exploit the tragedy now. The German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said such attacks sought to divide people. Berlin's mayor, Kai Wegener, said yesterday's celebration had been turned into a dark day. Jared Reid is a reporter at Deutsche Welle in Berlin, and he told me first more about events today. The suspect was shot dead after what was a very big and long manhunt.

2:38Police shot the suspect after he himself charged at offices while he was armed with some kind of blade. And there were resuscitation efforts that were attempted on him at the scene, but he died at the scene. Police are also not ruling out that he may have had some accomplices, but this is something that they're just going to have to continue to try and establish over the next little while as they investigate. As soon as his identity was revealed, the media will have been an overdrive revealing details about the suspect. What more is out there now? What we know from judicial authorities that released a statement today is that they said that the suspect had made various attempts to leave Germany and join the Islamic State militant group and that he made contact with multiple individuals in Lebanon that he believed were members of IS.

3:36And he apparently spent a short period of time in prison in Lebanon last year, then returned to Germany at the end of last year, at the end of his prison term, and was arrested at Berlin International Airport. He spent some months in pretrial detention in Germany, but was then released by a district court in Berlin. And what, authorities have said today is that they are treating this as an Islamist terrorist act. And so that basically means that the federal public prosecutor's office is taking over the investigation into this. What's the mood in Berlin today? Well, the mood is one of shock, really, and disbelief.

4:23People are pretty heartbroken. I think for the LGBTQ plus community, this is a really devastating moment. We've heard some comments from the mayor of Berlin. His name is Kai Wigner. And he has basically said this was an attack on all of us. And I think that really does get to the heart of how people are feeling today. An attack like this has the potential to be incendiary, doesn't it, in a country like Germany with a big far right anti-immigrant political representation? Well, it has triggered very strong reactions across the political spectrum. We've heard leaders, various leaders, condemn the violence, but I guess are giving different assessments of its causes and implications.

5:10It's reignited debate, certainly over Germany's security policies and counter-terrorism measures. We've heard politicians from the centre-right CDU, so this is the larger party in the governing coalition, they've called for tougher measures in response. But you mentioned the alternative for Germany. they have used the incident to criticise the government's handling of security issues. And certainly this incident will play a role in what are three very important upcoming regional elections in September, in which the AfD is expected to either win or at least perform very strongly. That was Deutsche Welle reporter Jared Reid in Berlin.

5:53Kai Böller is a member of the board of the German Pride Organiser Association and was at the event in Berlin. I asked him first how things had unfolded. We get noticed that some incident was happened. No one knows exactly what it was. And then the organising team decided to end the event and to evacuate everyone. one. It was a huge decision to make to call off something on this scale. Yeah, but then more and more information dropped in and it was a very horrible thing happened at the Tiergarten and so it was the best decision we could make to secure all these people. And what is your reaction to what happened?

6:39I'm deeply shocked. The whole community in Germany is deeply shocked today. We remember Orlando. We remember the things in Munich, in Magdeburg, the things in Bautzen and Leipzig two years ago. But now this happened in the heart of our nation. In the run-up to this event, the organisers were talking about a harsher social climate, more anti-gay sentiment. Tell me about that. Oh, yeah. We recognize the last two years a strong growth of anti-gay attitudes. We have this right-wing party in the parliament, the AfD, and they drove campaigns against queer people, we can talk this, and against migrants and very, very violent speech they used.

7:33And we can see that there are a lot of attacks in the digital world, but also a lot of attacks in the real world. People get attacked in person over the last two years more and more. The police seem pretty clear that this was an Islamist attack. What do you make of that? Yeah, but there is nearly no difference between these right-wing attacks and Islamic attacks. They both, they are convinced that people have different worth, that there are right people and that there are false people. There's no different between these two ideologies. That was Kai Buller, who was one of the organisers of gay pride celebrations in Berlin.

8:17Let's hear live now from Sajan Gohal, who is the Director of International Security at the Asia Pacific Foundation based here in London. He's been advising organizations, including NATO, on counterterrorism. Welcome, Dr. Gohel. The attack yesterday has been classified as an Islamist terror attack. What do you make of that? Well, it is very concerning based on the scale of this and the modus operandi of using a vehicle as a lethal weapon to mow people down. It looked like that this individual then had a secondary weapon, what looks like potentially a machete to attack individuals. And then if you see the fact that ultimately he died engaging with the police, that again fits into the ISIS operation style, because they always talk about death by cop, try to kill civilians, then try to fight the police.

9:11So this unfortunately fits into that textbook style of ISIS-related plots. And can we speculate about his motivation, especially given that he was only 21? Well, he was indeed quite young. But if we see the fact that this is an individual who had posted online on Instagram promoting ISIS in the past, he traveled to Lebanon ostensibly to try and link up with the dregs of ISIS. And if you look at the fact that the attack in Berlin itself was homophobic, it's important to point out that ISIS itself as a terrorist organization is vehemently homophobic. Back in 2015, through its propaganda, it promoted an article in their Dabek magazine talking about clamping down on what it said was sexual deviancy.

10:05ISIS also, when they were at their peak, they were throwing people off the rooftops of buildings on accusations that they were gay. And they filmed this. So this is a group that is steeped with homophobia. And unfortunately, we've seen now what transpired in places like Syria actually now manifesting in Germany itself. There have been several deadly Islamist extremist attacks in Germany and a spate of foiled plots too. Why Germany? Well, I think one of the challenges was that as ISIS were growing and expanding, they were very much dependent on foreign terrorist fighters to join their ranks. Some people weren't able to travel there, so instead they chose to carry out attacks inside Germany.

10:53I think one of the most notorious tied to ISIS, again using a vehicle, was back in 2016 at the Christmas market in Berlin. So Anas Amri, he murdered a lorry driver, took possession of the vehicle, and then rammed it into the marketplace, killing 13 people. And then we can also talk about last year where at a Holocaust memorial, an ISIS-inspired attacker tried to kill people thinking they were Jewish, and he actually ended up stabbing a Spanish tourist. So we are seeing, unfortunately, that there are these cases. We've moved from the coordinated top-down ISIS operations to more sporadic, spontaneous, lone actor ones, but nevertheless still inspired by the ISIS ideology, which is getting a retrofit appeal online through the various ecosystems that exist.

11:47Yes, because IS had been seen by many as a spent force in recent years. Is that a misconception? Well, I think even though the physical so-called caliphate of ISIS, where it controlled territory in Iraq and Syria doesn't exist anymore, the ideology still continues. And it proliferates, it evolves, the old propaganda is still there for people to access. And then there's a new generation, a Gen Z generation, that is adding its own interpretation. And I think also what we're seeing is the diffusion as to what those ideological barriers were. So for example, ISIS was actually seen as a rival to al-Qaeda.

12:27But what you're finding is that people are mixing and matching ISIS ideology with al-Qaeda ideology, tactics and strategies. So it almost doesn't even matter now necessarily which is strictly rigid group is practicing a certain doctrine. Sorry, I'm going to have to end it there. Sajjan Gohal, Director of International Security at the Asia-Pacific Foundation. Many thanks. This is NewsHour.

12:59Coming up, a vast wildlife migration area has been designated South Sudan's first ever World Heritage Site. It's incredible. Even the more conservative estimates for this migratory landscape has it at about the size of England. Other ecologists that you speak to will probably say that it's twice that size. The headlines, German police have shot dead the man accused of carrying out Saturday's deadly attack on Berlin Pride. The US ambassador to the United Nations says President Trump has paused attacks on Iran to give diplomacy more time. And relations between Argentina and Brazil have worsened.

13:37over a row about comments made by the Argentinian president, Javier Millet.

13:59I'm Paul Henley and this is NewsHour, live from the BBC in London. A wave of attacks by Israeli settlers has continued across the occupied West Bank after four Palestinians and two Israelis were shot dead in violent confrontations near Nablus on Friday. Israel's Prime Minister has said he'll speed up the establishment of a new farm outpost in the West Bank in response to the killings. Overnight, two mosques near Nablus were set on fire and Hebrew graffiti calling for revenge was left scrawled on walls. Israel's army says it condemns nationalist violence and is working to prevent incidents of nationalist crime, its term for attacks by extremist Israeli settlers.

14:44Our Middle East correspondent Lucy Williamson has spent the weekend in the Palestinian villages around Nablus and she sent this report.

14:55Since Friday's shooting, a wave of settler attacks has left a trail of charred buildings in the Palestinian villages around Nablus. Last night, two mosques were set ablaze. Hebrew graffiti left by the attackers read, Revenge, alongside the name of an Israeli settler shot near Nablus on Friday.

15:18In the nearby village of Sara, residents said six houses were burned by settlers later that day. This is one of the houses attacked by settlers in the village of Sara on Friday. day. We've been talking to residents who've described their terror at seeing large crowds of settlers cross these hills and head up into the village. They say they threw Molotov cocktails through the windows of houses, setting fire to around six of them and attacked more than a dozen others. They say that these kinds of attacks have happened here before, but never with this level of violence.

16:01One was Hanan Tarabi's home.

16:07She told me she stayed until the last second as crowds of settlers ran towards her before fleeing with four children. They had us with, they have a lot of stick, the baseball. Kai Tarabi, visiting from Miami when the attack took place, was left with 12 stitches in his head after settlers wielding clubs invaded the village. I work all my life with the Jewish people, with the ribbon, but like these people, I never see, but all of them, they have the cover face, all of them, they have a lot of stuff. They came ready. It's scary. Hours later, settlers were spotted again on the outskirts of Sara. We're just seeing a group of armed settlers gather at the entrance to Sara village here.

16:53Villagers have been watching the outpost all day, waiting for more attacks, and you can feel how nervous people are here.

17:07We watched dozens of young men gather in the village to confront them as Israeli soldiers stood guard, firing tear gas to disperse the Palestinians as the settlers slowly melted away. We've just seen more army jeeps arrive at the edge of the village. They've been firing tear gas canisters further and further into the village to try and push this crowd back. We can see a few soldiers walking down, closer to where we're standing, pushing the villagers back down into the village. There's another group of soldiers behind them at the top of the road.

17:50They've just fired tear gas really close to us. One of the villagers is coming and trying to cover it with earth. This is a practice routine.

18:02The soldiers have been moving down the road towards us. They've told us to go. The tear gas is everywhere. New Israeli outposts have already appeared around this area since Friday. All Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law. But Palestinians in Sara say that won't protect them from settlers with a government and an army behind them. The BBC's Middle East correspondent Lucy Williamson ending that report. Welcome back to NewsHour. The head of the Anglican Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has begun a visit to West Africa, taking in Ghana and Cameroon, the archbishop's the first woman in the job, and that comes with controversy, including vocal objections from some of the more traditional elements of the church in Africa.

18:50Add to that that Dame Sarah Mulally is a champion of same-sex unions, and you have a visit that's not universally welcomed. I've been speaking to Reginald Frimpong Ansar Ajay, who is International Communications Director for the Anglican Church in Ghana. It meant so much to the Ghanaian young lady to aspire to any height that they want to go in this life. And so the women and young ladies in Ghana are really excited and counting themselves blessed and lucky. Now it's fair to say, isn't it, that not everyone in the church in Ghana shares your joy over the fact that the archbishop is a woman? I mean, you should expect that in life there's diversity, but majority of the people from Accra, Mampong, Kumase, Hipkos, Second D, Tamalee Diocese, there's joy.

19:43There's a lot of joy. What do you say to the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, a group of Orthodox churches that expressed clear displeasure over her appointment simply because she is a woman? We say to them, let's come together. Whatever God does is good in his sight. So let's come together. This is God's doing. There's nothing we can do about it and we should be excited about it. It's testing differences, not just her gender, but the fact that she champions same-sex couples, which is obviously a source of contention in the global Anglican community. Same-sex marriage is not recognised in Ghana.

20:21Homosexuality has been re-declared illegal there. That is an ongoing issue. And we would want to focus on the positive and leave those conversations to those who want to have that conversation. But so far as we are concerned in Ghana, we are excited she's here and we are receiving her with a lot of joy. OK, but in the past, Dame Sarah Mullally has actively wanted those conversations. She's among the people who wants to talk about homosexuality. I think that we would create the time, we would create the opportunity and we would have that conversation when the time is really right. When will the time be right?

20:57Very soon. God's time is always the best. If she chose to raise this issue during her visit to Ghana, championing same-sex couples, how would it go down? I think that it is one of the things that we would want as much as possible not to destroy the joy that she comes with. There's timing for everything. In Ghana, we have our own way of doing a lot of things. So when the time is right, this conversation will be had by the Anglican Church, Ghana. But I'm not talking about an internal conversation among the church. I'm talking about this conversation we're having now. Is the Anglican Church in Ghana, does it stand against homosexuality, or is it something that it is open to?

21:42The Anglican Church is in the middle. God's creation is God's creation. We do not condemn, we do not praise. Reginald Frimpong Ansar Adje of the Anglican Church in Ghana.

22:03You're listening to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. I'm Paul Henley. The US ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, says President Trump has paused his military campaign against Iran to give diplomacy more time. Earlier, an Iranian army spokesperson said Tehran had halted its attacks in the region after the US stopped its strikes over the past two nights. U.S. media reports have suggested concern over falling supplies of weapons could be behind the pause. Mr. Waltz spoke to the U.S. network NBC on Sunday morning. What the president is doing right now, as we've seen all along, is giving some talks some space.

22:45Talks are ongoing. They're happening at every level, from the more technical aspect of it all the way to the highest levels, of course, within both the Iranian government and the U.S. government. What we are constantly seeing, though, is on the Iranian regime side, they are divided. There is internal fighting. Some are seeking the guidance of the supreme leader. Others want to move into a different direction. And that makes it hugely challenging from a diplomatic standpoint, but to get to some reasonable resolution here. Iran says it's also halted strikes while talks through Omani mediators continue.

23:23We can speak live now to Sanam Vakil, who is director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at the influential think tank Chatham House here in London. Dr. Vakil, welcome. There's been a lot of stop-start in this conflict. What do you make of this latest pause? Well, over the past 48 hours, the Iranians, with a lot of help from partners in the Gulf like Oman and Qatar, have been negotiating. And that has perhaps made ample progress for the United States to halt bombing for 48 hours. And the Iranians have also reciprocated by also withholding strikes in the Strait of Hormuz or on its neighbors across the region.

24:09This is a positive signal, but what we should be looking for are specificities relating to not just a ceasefire, but deal-making in terms of strengthening the memorandum of understanding that was signed in June and clear commitments to engage in prolonged negotiations. But there have been a lot of positive signals, a lot of negative ones too, and the White House sometimes says the opposite today of what it says yesterday. Indeed, indeed. But in tandem to the words coming out of the Trump administration, whether it's Ambassador Mike Waltz or members of the U.S. military that have also signaled that it might be worthwhile to wind things down.

24:56There have been reports that the U.S. government is overly using its interceptors in this war. It's proving to be quite expensive. And the president, despite indicating that he wants to continue pummeling Iran, is also looking for an off-ramp in what is looking to be quite a quagmire for the United States. So I think we have to judge the U.S. administration and President Trump specifically not by what he says, but what he does. Are both sides negotiating in any meaningful way at the moment? I'll be very honest, it's hard to say. We're not seeing any public visuals of negotiations. They're taking place through mediators with these back-channel countries like Oman and Qatar speaking to both sides and trying to come to an arrangement.

25:50Initially, there was a proposal on the table to impose a 10-day ceasefire and use that 10-day period to perhaps iron out some of the kinks of that memorandum of understanding that led to disagreements from the Iranian side and the American side. Now it's hard to see or really say with confidence what they're doing or what the plan of action is. That's OK. In my mind, we don't need to know what they do need to come out of this with is a strengthened document that both sides understand, not just in terms of the letter, but in terms of the meaning behind it. And pretty briefly, if you will, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is due in Washington this week.

26:39He's likely to ask Trump to restart strikes. Will Trump listen? Well, no, probably not. Prime Minister Netanyahu is also coming to showcase the strength of the U.S.-Israeli relationship in advance of Israel's October elections. There are other portfolios on the table, including Gaza, continued settler violence in the West Bank, which is very alarming, and, of course, the negotiations between Lebanon and the Israeli government. And I think President Trump is going to ask for Prime Minister Netanyahu to focus on his near abroad and set aside this Iran lobbying and leave that for the United States.