Executive Summary
On Saturday 25 July 2026, whilst Berlin was celebrating its Christopher Street Day (CSD) Pride festival, a car ploughed into the crowd near the Brandenburg Gate, killing one woman and injuring 29 people. The suspect, shot dead the following day by the SEK, was Abdul Ballout, a 21-year-old German citizen, who claimed responsibility for the attacks on behalf of ISIS. This attack highlights Europe’s continued vulnerability to terrorism and reignites debate over securing public spaces and counter-terrorism policy.
Key Points
- Despite a decline in terrorist attacks in the 2020s, Europe remains a prime target, and large gatherings are an easy target.
- The LGBTQIA+ community is also directly targeted, as it represents ‘Western values’: at least 9 terrorist or extremist attacks and plots have targeted the community worldwide since 2020.
- The use of vehicle-ramming has become an increasingly common tactic since the Nice attacks in 2016, with nearly 70% of all documented incidents occurring since then, though only 31% were classified as terrorism. As it is inexpensive and requires little training, it is structurally harder to prevent than well-funded, coordinated plots.
- The attacker’s profile fits the ‘homegrown lone actor’ profile. Ballout was known to the authorities and had been convicted in May of planning an act of violence against the state.
Analysis
This incident, reminiscent of the 2016 Berlin attack and the 2025 Munich attack, highlights the continuing vulnerability of Germany and Europe to the terrorist threat and exposes two security gaps.
First, despite the strengthening of security procedures and systems, this incident highlights the difficulty of fully securing public spaces. Although Berlin had secured the perimeter, the attack took place where the reinforced perimeter ended. Such measures shift the risk to the periphery rather than eliminating it. This can explain why ISIS-claimed vehicle-ramming attacks keep rising. The method is quick, leaves no financial trail, and involves no network communications that could be intercepted by the authorities. This attack reopens the debate between surveillance and individual freedom. Surveillance of crowds using prototype facial recognition systems already exists. The Safe City Project in 2019 showed encouraging results, but drew criticism from France’s data protection authority for a lack of public information regarding its effectiveness in global security.
The second gap concerns the detection and surveillance of radicalised individuals. Even though Ballout had already been convicted and was known to authorities, homegrown radicalisation is generally difficult to detect because it often involves no cell, funding, or wider network that counter-terrorism agencies can intercept. This raises the following question: how far should the state restrict the freedom of individuals already identified as dangerous? Following the attack, Interior Minister Dobrindt called for stronger preventive measures at a national level, including electronic monitoring and the removal of sentencing guidelines applicable to minors in the case of high-risk adults. Similar fragmentation exists at the EU level. Even where neighbouring states have national surveillance systems, there is no EU-wide register or official estimate of the number of people with proven links to terrorism who are under surveillance.
Policy Implications
- The EU must step up its cooperation with security agencies such as Europol and Interpol to improve the prevention of such attacks.
- Europe must step up its deradicalisation programmes, particularly in prisons, where young people are most likely to become radicalised.
- Europe has to find new ways of securing public space. Policy-makers should view the debate between ‘security’ and ‘an open society’ as a genuine public policy issue, rather than a decision taken in a knee-jerk reaction following a terrorist attack.
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