Germany's Interior Minister Called the Berlin Pride Attack Islamist Terror. The Man Who Did It Was a German Citizen Already Convicted of Trying to Join ISIS.

Germany's interior minister did not hedge.

'Everything we see here indicates that this was an Islamist terror attack,' Alexander Dobrindt said of the van driven into a crowd at Berlin Pride's closing party in Tiergarten on the night of July 25, which killed one person and injured 29 [1].

This newsroom is not going to soften that. The man who said it runs Germany's interior ministry, and he said it plainly.

What is worth adding is the part of the record that changes what kind of failure this was.

The 21-year-old suspect was a German citizen, born in Germany, with Lebanese roots [1].

He was already known to authorities for what reporting describes as a high number of previous crimes and for radicalisation. He had already been convicted of 'preparing a serious act of subversive violence' after attempting to join ISIS. For that he received a suspended sentence of one year and ten months [1].

Read that sequence again.

A man tries to join ISIS. He is caught, prosecuted and convicted of preparing a serious act of subversive violence. He is given a suspended sentence, which means he does not go to prison. He remains on the authorities' radar as radicalised.

Then he drives a van into a crowd.

Every step of that happened inside Germany, to a German citizen, in front of German institutions that were watching.

Whatever else this is, it is not a story about somebody arriving unnoticed. It is a story about somebody the state had already caught once, and let go with a suspended sentence.

Police located him in an allotment garden complex in Spandau the next day. They say he ran at officers with a bladed weapon and they opened fire; he died at the scene despite resuscitation [1].

Two things this newsroom is not doing.

We are not naming him, because we do not amplify people who kill for a cause.

We are also not treating the post-ramming blade reports as established. Those are attributed to police rather than independently confirmed, and the distinction between what police say and what has been shown is worth keeping in the first week of a story like this.