A mystery lioness is causing chaos on the streets of Berlin

A lioness is believed to be on the loose in Berlin - and we are not talking about England's football team.

Residents on the south-western outskirts of Berlin are being urged to stay indoors and stay out of the woods after overnight sightings of a “loose, dangerous animal”, which police reckon is a lioness.

Nurseries were allowed to open but were urged to avoid letting children play outdoors.

But the weird thing is 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.

Authorities are using helicopters 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.

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“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.”

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.

How very mysterious.

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