The woman whose son brought terror to Berlin is sitting on a worn red leather couch in a three-room apartment in Berlin’s Tiergarten district. It is Thursday afternoon, and she is pointing to the several missed calls on her phone screen.
They are all from the evening of July 25. They are all from the same person: Abdul Ballout, her son.
“He was terribly afraid for me,” she says quietly, her voice trembling. “I didn’t know why.”
She scrolls through the call log — the last traces of her child from the day of the attack, the day the unknown 21-year-old became the most wanted man in Germany.
She wants the public to get to know him — the son, the brother, the young man that she knew. “I find the way people talk about him incredibly painful, to be honest,” she says. “He was a good person.”
