BERLIN (AP) — For Ali Darwich, the deadly attack on the Berlin Pride Festival was an attack on the city of Berlin and everything it stands for: its diversity, its tolerance and its belief in freedom.
On a personal level, it also was an attack on everything the Berliner embodies.
“Born a Muslim, living as a gay man, working as a police officer," Darwich said, as he tried holding back the tears, “this terror attack touches so many aspects of who I am.”
Saturday night's van ramming and stabbing near Berlin’s Pride festival that left one person dead and many others wounded is believed to have been an Islamic extremist terror attack, authorities say.
The suspect in the attack remains at large. Authorities issued a wanted notice and warned people against approaching Abdul Ballout, a 21-year-old German citizen with Lebanese roots, saying that he may be armed and dangerous.
On Sunday, Darwich, 34, watched sadly as more and more members of the LGBTQ+ community came to Tiergarten park, where the attack took place. They put down flowers, hugged each other and looked in disbelief at the crashed van, which still stood cordoned off behind dozens of police officers.
Like Darwich, many of them had been celebrating life and love just hours earlier, protesting for equality and warning of an increase of hate crimes against their community.
“I was wearing my rainbow-colored shirt, carried a banner at the parade saying ‘why are some people afraid of love but not of hate?,’ and was about to go to an afterparty last night, when friends started calling me to check if I was OK,” he said.
When he understood that there had been an attack, he canceled the party and went home filled with sorrow. But it was only after he woke up on Sunday morning that he truly grasped the significance of the attack.
“I asked myself, why as a police officer I did not run to the scene of the crash to help my colleagues. I asked myself as a gay if we will have to live with more fear now even though we are already experiencing bullying and hatred. I asked myself as a Muslim if our community will be exposed to even more racism now.”
Darwich, who was born in Berlin and has Lebanese and Palestinian roots, expressed worry that the attack would polarize German society even more.
“I’m actually feeling desperate this morning," said Darwich, who also works as a gay Muslim influencer and posts many videos on social media that usually try to strike a positive note. “We can’t get rid of the hatred some people feel, and it’s just getting worse and worse.”
But at the same time, he said he did not want to let hate win and that deep inside he still hoped that "the people of Berlin will make the best of it, that they will work together, and that, hopefully, all of this will lead to an even better Berlin.”
Others, who had come to the impromptu vigil at Tiergarten, also expressed anger and shock, but also resilience.
“We are simply stunned by what happened yesterday,” said Andre Lehmann, a top official with the main national LGBTQ+ association, LSVD+. “This suspected attack hits the heart of the queer community.”
The attack “affects people who took to the street in Berlin this weekend to fight for their rights, their diversity and their rights, and of course with that it is a political act and does not just affect people celebrating,” he said.
Lehmann said that there has been “a tenfold increase of anti-queer hate crime in Germany within a few years.” He added that “for years, to be honest, nothing has happened and also, to be honest, for years there has been no outcry from society.”
Ashley Jump, a 26-year-old U.K. resident, had traveled to Berlin for Saturday’s Pride parade but had left the celebrations before the attack. Jump, still in shock, returned Sunday to leave flowers at a memorial near the crime scene.
“They’ll never erase us, we’ll never be gone,” they said, their voice shivering from pain. “As long as humanity has existed, we’ve existed. And as long as humanity exists, we will exist. We will not be removed.”
