The suspect in the deadly Berlin Pride attack that left one person dead and 29 injured was shot and killed by police during a confrontation on Sunday in a suburb of the city, authorities said.
Abdul Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, was killed following a search that lasted nearly 24 hours after the attack in downtown Berlin. Prosecutors said he had previously sought to join the militant Islamic State group.
Ballout was suspected of driving a van into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride festival Saturday night before apparently stabbing others with a machete in what authorities believe was an Islamic extremist terror attack.
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the attack occurred a few hundred meters (yards) from a party near the Brandenburg Gate that was supposed to close out the city’s Pride festival.
Ballout was tracked down around 6 p.m. Sunday at a garden in Spandau, a Berlin suburb, the city’s police department wrote on X. They said he apparently ran toward officers with a sharp instrument, and police fired at least one shot. He died at the scene.
Ballout was born in Germany, the minister said. His mother was naturalized in 2002, three years before he was born.
So this reminds me of something I learned growing up in an area with a lot of Latino gang violence.
The people with these angry disillussioned attitudes were never first generation immigrants who have just arrived. Those are generally polite law abiding citizens who are glad to have gotten somewhere safer.
The people inovled with gangs were second and third generations who were caught between the culture of their parents and the culture of the nation in which they now live.
It was theorized to be related to feelings of isolation. Isolated from the world their parents come from, and through racism and discrimination, isolation from the world they exist in now. Two different worlds pulling at them and they don’t feel like they belong in either world.
So they seek out others like themselves, and like many lost young men, they begin to radicalize.
It’s a mixture of exactly what you described and the inequality that forms through the socioeconomic background. Your law abiding first gen immigrant parents probably don’t have a lot of money and don’t know the language well. That makes it a lot less likely for you to succeed academically. Not impossible but a lot less likely. Yet the expectation is a lot higher than it was for your parents.
So you’re in between cultures, tribeless and feel like a failure because you didn’t become a doctor or engineer. Prime candidate for radicalization.
Yeah, no. In this case it is much more likely a failure of the parents, prolly cos they didn’t bother to integrate and learn the native language, leading to the fact that at home the perpetrator didn’t learn to speak german and likely only learned it when he got into school. Of course then making friends is a lot more difficult, and so the foreign kids stick with oneanother, and not talking german between them, making learning german and integrating even more difficult.
You can literally see this in a lot of elementary schools where the proportion of migrant kids is really high.