BERLIN, Germany -- The man blamed for the deadly attack near Berlin’s Pride parade at the weekend pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group in a video, prosecutors told AFP Tuesday.
The video clip was found on the phone of Abdul Rahman Ballout, 21, and was recorded on Saturday, the day of the attack that killed a 65-year-old Polish woman and injured 31 people, they said, confirming media reports.
A Public Prosecutor’s Office spokesperson told AFP that the clip shows a masked individual, presumed to be Ballout, pledging allegiance to IS.
Bild daily reported that Ballout’s phone was found inside the rented minivan the attacker ploughed into a crowd near the parade before he crashed it into a tree in the Tiergarten park.
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt then said in televised comments that “we assume the person in the video is the suspect.”
Investigators were “in the process of accessing and analyzing 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 crashed vehicle, Bild reported.
Ballout was shot dead on Sunday by police, who said he ran at them with a bladed weapon.
Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, was known to the criminal justice system and last year travelled to Lebanon in a failed attempt to fight for IS.
A Lebanese judicial source told AFP that Ballout was sentenced to three months in jail there for belonging to IS.
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.
