Residents on the south-western outskirts of Berlin are being urged to stay indoors after overnight sightings of a “loose, dangerous animal”, suspected to be an escaped lioness.
Brandenburg police advised people living in the districts of Kleinmachnow, Stahnsdorf and Teltow on the borders of the German capital to refrain from walking in the woods and to keep pets or farm animals indoors on Thursday. Nurseries were allowed to open but were urged to avoid letting children play outdoors.
Authorities are using helicopters, drones and thermal imaging cameras to track down the big cat, which police believed was resting in a wooded area. A veterinarian and two armed hunters were on site and under orders to either stun or shoot dead the animal, officials in the district of Potsdam-Mittelmark said.
“Around midnight we received a notification that we couldn’t believe,” the Brandenburg police spokesperson Daniel Kiep told the broadcaster rbb. “Two passersby spotted an animal chasing after another. One was a wild boar and the other appeared to be a big cat, a lion. The two men recorded a video on their phones and even experienced police officers had to confirm that we are probably dealing with a lion.”
Police said at a midday press conferencethat two officers had seen the animal in two separate instances overnight, but that there been no further sightings since. Reports of a sighting in the Zehlendorf district, inside Berlin’s borders, had turned out to be a false lead.
Fire services in Brandenburg said the large animal was “presumably a lioness”. However, the director of a circus in the Teltow area told local media he was not aware of any lions being held in circuses or private zoos in the area and said the animal could be a misidentified Caucasian shepherd dog. “If it’s a lion I’ll eat a broom,” Michel Rogall told Tagesspiegel newspaper.
Police said they had not been informed of any lion escape in the area. “Neither an animal park, a zoo nor a circus is missing such an animal,” a spokesperson said. Berlin’s two zoos – the Zoological Gardens in the old west and Tierpark Berlin in the old east – both confirmed that they weren’t missing any animals from their enclosures.
• This article was amended on 20 July 2023 because the zoo in the old east is Tierpark Berlin, not Tiergarten Berlin as an earlier version said.
