A 30-hour search for an escaped lioness that had residents on the southern fringes of Berlin shelter in their homes and the rest of the German capital on tenterhooks has found that what was thought to be an exotic feline predator was most likely a common wild pig.
After no more sightings of the big cat were reported overnight, Michael Grubert, the mayor of the municipality of Kleinmachnow, said two leading experts had analysed the video that had originally triggered the lion hunt. “With a relatively high degree of certainty the tendency is towards a wild boar,” Grubert said.
“As far as it is humanly possible to judge, we are not dealing with a lion,” he added. “There is no hazardous situation. All tipoffs have led nowhere.”
On Thursday morning, Brandenburg police had urged residents in three municipalities on the outskirts of Berlin via a warning app to stay indoors and bring pets and farm animals inside. In a statement to the press, police warned of a “loose, dangerous animal”, which it later identified as most likely being a lioness.
Overnight, police said they had received information from two witnesses who had filmed the predator attacking and killing a wild pig. Two police officers had also seen the animal, a spokesperson claimed. Helicopters, armoured vehicles, drones, thermal-imaging cameras and more than 300 police officers spent a day and a night scouring woodlands in the area.
On Thursday evening, police renewed their warning, telling people to avoid forested areas around the edges of southern Berlin. An outdoor concert in Kleinmachnow was moved indoors.
At 7.30pm on Thursday the tabloid Bild reported a further sighting of the “lioness” in a wooded area in the same district, announcing an imminent showdown that never materialised.
But biologists increasingly voiced scepticism about the video of the original sighting being shared on social media networks. On Friday, Grubert cited two such experts who believed that the curvature of the filmed animal’s back was too flat for a large cat.
The sound of a lion roaring in the Zehlendorf district inside Berlin’s borders turned out to have been played through bluetooth speakers by a group of teenagers. “Neither helpful for the police nor the local community,” a spokesperson said. No traces of the boar that the lion was supposed to have killed were ever found.
At 9am on Thursday, police searched another small wooded area in Kleinmachnow with drones and thermal cameras, only to disturb a family of boars.
Grubert and a spokesperson for Brandenburg police on Friday morning tried to justify the 30-hour lion hunt. “The risk situation was such that it was justifiable to employ police,” Grubert said.
