The assailant accused of turning a rented minivan into a weapon near Berlin’s Pride parade recorded a pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State group on the day of the deadly attack, according to German media.
The video was discovered on the mobile phone of 21-year-old Abdul Rahman Ballout, the daily Bild reported, citing unnamed security sources.
According to Bild, investigators found Ballout’s phone inside the rented minivan he drove into a crowd only a few hundred metres from the parade route, before the vehicle slammed into a tree in the Tiergarten park.
Also found beside the phone was a sheath for the machete Ballout is believed to have used to attack additional victims after getting out of the vehicle.
Police shot Ballout dead on Sunday after, officers said, he charged at them carrying a bladed weapon.
Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, was already known to the criminal justice system and had travelled to Lebanon last year in an unsuccessful bid to fight for IS.
A Lebanese judicial source said he was later sentenced to three months in prison in Lebanon for belonging to IS.
On his return to Germany, Ballout was detained, and in May a juvenile court convicted him of “planning a serious act of subversive violence”, handing him a suspended sentence of one year and 10 months.
Prosecutors have been approached for confirmation.
