German authorities criticized over recent leniency toward Pride killing suspect

German authorities are facing tough questions over why a man blamed for a deadly attack near Berlin’s Pride parade was at large despite his Islamist radicalization and recent conviction for “preparing an act of violence.”

Abdul Ballout, 21, is believed to have plowed a rented minivan into a crowd Saturday at the edge of Berlin’s Tiergarten park before attacking people with a machete, killing one woman and wounding 29.

Ballout was most recently convicted in May of “planning a serious act of subversive violence” and given a jail sentence of one year and 10 months in jail. However the sentence was suspended, partially in recognition of the time he had already spent in jail in Lebanon and his pre-trial detention, and because he had admitted to the crimes and claimed to have distanced himself from ISIS.

Marc Henrichmann, a lawmaker from Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s center-right CDU who chairs the parliamentary committee supervising intelligence agencies, says that tougher measures are necessary in such cases.

“The freedoms of extremists and Islamists must not be given undue value, especially when people’s lives are at risk,” he tells the Handelsblatt newspaper.

The head of Germany’s police officers’ association, Dirk Peglow, also charges that the justice system was too lax with Ballout.

“With people who pose such a threat, the end of their time in detention must not be the end of state supervision,” he says, speaking to the same business daily.

The interior minister in the southern state of Bavaria, Joachim Herrmann, meanwhile labels the decision to suspend Ballout’s sentence “catastrophic.”

“The judges who have to take such decisions must know the responsibility they have for people’s security,” he tells public broadcaster BR.