Berlin police and prosecutors have now published the document: the Christopher Street Day suspect was shot dead by specialist officers at a Spandau allotment
The release is numbered 0906.
Polizei Berlin and the Generalstaatsanwaltschaft Berlin published it jointly on Sunday, filed under the Mitte and Spandau districts, and it runs to five sentences. In the course of intensive investigation by the police and the Berlin prosecutors, it says, a possible location for the suspect was identified in the late afternoon at a garden colony on Ruhlebener Strasse in Spandau. On current knowledge the 21-year-old is alleged to have attacked the deployed specialist officers with a stabbing weapon, whereupon those officers used their firearms. The man suffered fatal injuries from that and died at the scene. Further investigation continues.
That is the whole of it. The document does not name him. It attributes no motive to anyone, it does not describe the attack in the park as established fact, and it keeps the German conditional that release 0905 used the same morning, which is the form German police use for an allegation rather than a finding.
Four hours ago this site published that the wanted appeal was still the newest thing Berlin police had put out, and that a media report of the man's death and an active appeal to find him were pointing in opposite directions. That gap has closed. Release 0905 now sits beneath 0906 on the same page, which is how Berlin police stack a follow-up, so both can be read in one place.
The State of Berlin's own portal carried the confirmation separately on Sunday, attributing it to the Senate Department of the Interior, and adding that according to a police statement the man was shot and died of his injuries despite immediate resuscitation efforts. The same page reports that police put none of the injured in a life-threatening condition by Sunday afternoon. Its author line reads dpa and BerlinOnline, so it is agency copy on an official site rather than a second official statement, and it is treated here as the former.
What the document still does not settle is most of it. There is no account of how many officers fired, no confirmation from any Berlin authority of the identification German outlets have been running, and no statement from the prosecutors on what the investigation now becomes when the only suspect is dead. Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt classified the attack on Sunday as an Islamist terrorist attack, and that classification is his, not the police document's, which is why it is attributed here and not asserted.
One woman was killed at the Christopher Street Day fringe on Saturday evening and 29 people were injured, on Dobrindt's own figures given at the scene at midday. The release published tonight records a second death, the suspect's own, and revises nothing about the first.
