German Anti-Immigrant Rally Canceled as Leader Is Threatened
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Version 0 of 1. BERLIN — An anti-immigrant movement whose weekly rallies in Dresden have swelled to 25,000 participants called off on Sunday this week’s scheduled rally, citing warnings of a terrorist threat to its leader. Lutz Bachmann, the head of the movement Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, known by its German acronym Pegida, said by telephone that the threat concerned him, but he deferred to the police for more details. A police spokesman, Thomas Geithner, said the authorities had decided on a 24-hour ban on all public marches from midnight Sunday to midnight Monday after what at first appeared to be “abstract threats” turned into a concrete statement urging unidentified assailants to attack a Pegida leader at the rally Monday. The message urging an attack resembled an earlier post on Twitter in Arabic denouncing Pegida as “an enemy of Islam,” the Dresden police chief, Dieter Kroll, said in a statement. He said the police and security forces had no choice but to ban all demonstrations to guarantee public safety. Mr. Geithner, speaking by phone from Dresden, declined to give more details. Pegida said on its website that an abstract warning of an attack had turned into a “concrete threat to kill” one of the 12-member team leading the movement. After consulting the police and security officials, Pegida said it felt compelled to call off what would have been its 13th consecutive Monday rally. In France, the Paris police chief on Saturday also banned an “Islamists out of France” rally scheduled for Sunday in the capital that had been organized by two groups promoting secular and republican values after the terror attacks there, The Associated Press reported. Bernard Boucault, the Paris police chief, ordered the ban, saying that the rally might incite civil unrest. Pegida, after canceling its rally in Dresden, called instead on Europeans who are for freedom of opinion and against what it termed “religious fanaticism” to put a national flag and a lighted candle in their window Monday evening as a plea for peace. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière of Germany had said on Friday that there were tips from foreign intelligence agencies about some kind of attack in Germany, some more serious than others, as he put it. German media citing unidentified officials said the tips concerned the main railway stations in Berlin and Dresden, and the Pegida movement. Tensions have grown in Dresden in recent days after the discovery there last Tuesday of the body of a 20-year-old Eritrean, Khaled Idris, a refugee who had sought asylum. The police at first said they had detected no signs of foul play, but later announced a murder investigation after an autopsy found that the man had stab wounds to his chest and throat. Some 2,700 people participated in a vigil for Mr. Idris on Saturday in Dresden. Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets in cities across Germany to protest against Pegida, while far smaller numbers of sympathizers have also gathered in several places. Only in Dresden were Pegida supporters in the majority last week, with a record 25,000 people attending its rally. |