Today’s PEGIDA rally has been cancelled by German authorities:
Dresden (Germany) (AFP) – German police banned a planned rally by the an
ti-Islamic PEGIDA movement and other public open-air gatherings in the eastern city of Dresden Monday, citing a terrorist threat.
Dresden police said Sunday they had received information from federal and state counterparts indicating a “concrete threat” against the right-wing populist group “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident”.
There had been calls for would-be “assassins to mingle among the protesters… and to murder an individual member of the organising team of the PEGIDA demonstrations”, police said in a notice on the 24-hour ban.
This was consistent with “an Arabic-language tweet that called the PEGIDA demonstrations an enemy of Islam”, it said.
Top-circulation daily Bild said online that the threat targeted PEGIDA’s most prominent leader Lutz Bachmann.
A PEGIDA spokeswoman, Kathrin Oertel, confirmed on German television that Bachmann was the target.
