Berlin police snipers shot dead on Sunday evening the 21-year-old chief suspect in a weekend van attack on a Pride parade in the German capital that left one woman dead and 29 other people injured.Just after 6pm local time (5pm Irish time) on Sunday evening a special forces team tracked down Berliner Abdul Ballout to an allotment in the western outskirts of the German capital, reportedly after a tip from a relative.According to a police spokesman, the snipers exchanged fire with the man before he ran towards them with a knife and was shot multiple times. Attempts to revive him failed and he was pronounced dead at the scene.The dead man, born in 2005 in Berlin to a family with Lebanese roots, was known to Berlin police for Islamist sympathies and had a criminal record.Berlin’s state interior minister, Iris Spranger, thanked security services for their “wonderful achievement”.“I am grateful to the security authorities that they found the perpetrator so quickly,” she said on Sunday evening.The killing ends a nervous 20 hours for Berlin that began when a speeding white Citroen van rammed a crowd at 9:53pm local time on Saturday evening near a concert at the Brandenburg Gate that closed the city’s Pride parade. The driver escaped on foot, triggering an unprecedented all-night manhunt in the adjacent Tiergarten park, involving heat-seeking cameras, sniffer dogs and police helicopters overhead with floodlights.Early on Sunday morning, special forces searched a nearby train tunnel and an apartment near the scene of the attack, where the suspect reportedly lived with his mother.The attack triggered waves of shock and uncertainty around Berlin on Sunday, as locals and visitors gathered at memorials and church services.Organisers of the weekend Christopher Street Day (CSD) parade described the attack as “an attempt to divide people and play them off against each other”. Marcel Voges, head of the parade committee added: “We as CSD will not allow that happen.”On Sunday evening, news of the fatal shooting spread quickly to an improvised Tiergarten memorial, with flowers and handmade signs. One read: “Love is a terrible thing to hate.”Near a memorial to the homosexuals murdered in the Nazi era, a rainbow heart sign hanging from a tree read: “For the attack victims. For us.”“I’m so angry, shaken, wounded,” said local gay man Anton (48) at the memorial. “It’s taken 24 hours for it to sink in, that this was not just an attack on people but an attack on me and people like me.”