German city cancels parade after receiving ‘credible Islamist terror threat’

The German city of Braunschweig has cancelled its annual carnival parade because of a “specific threat of an Islamist attack”, police said. Organisers of Schoduvel (“scaring the devil away”) carnival said the event in Braunschweig was normally the biggest parade in northern Germany during February’s Roman Catholic carnival season. The event, which was to begin this morning, was called off 90-minutes before the scheduled start following a tip by “reliable state security sources”, police said in a statement. They asked all visitors not to go to the planned parade route or make the trip to Braunschweig, the statement said.

Many people arriving at the train station were already dressed up and very disappointed – but we didn’t want to take any risks.

Police spokesman Thomas Geese as quoted by BBC News

The decision to cancel the parade was taken by Mayor Ulrich Markurth and the parade’s marshal, Gerhard Baller. There was no immediate indication whether there was a connection with two fatal attacks in Copenhagen Saturday, little more than a month after bloody Islamist attacks in Paris that left 17 people dead. Last month, Germany’s biggest carnival procession, which often includes edgy political satire, banned a float paying tribute to the slain cartoonists of French magazine Charlie Hebdo due to security fears. The float design, selected in an online popular vote, featured a man dressed in black with an explosives belt and a drawn gun and a jester shoving a pencil down its barrel.

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