The leader of Germany’s anti-Islamic Pegida movement has taunted those who welcomed refugees into the country in the wake of a planned terrorist attack on two of Munich’s railway stations.
Lutz Bachmann, who founded the movement in 2014 in Dresden, tweeted soon after police evacuated evacuated Hauptbahnhof and Pasing stations at the western end of the city. His post read: “All welcome-clappers should arrive immediately at Munich’s main train station.”
Police in Munich evacuated the train stations following intelligence provided by a foreign country of a “serious” and “imminent threat” in the German city.
Attached to Mr Bachmann’s post was the hashtag “RegugISISnotWelcome” – used to mock the slogan “refugees are welcome here”. He was then condemned on social media but hit back at critics, adding: “I don’t get the uproar. You clap-idiots wanted the refugees in Europe. Why are you now wetting yourselves and not at Munich station?”
His post came after the Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, used her new year’s address to urge Germans to see the unprecedented number of refugees arriving in the country as an “opportunity for tomorrow.” She also pleaded with listeners not to follow the nationalists with “coldness, even hatred, in their hearts”.
Pegida was initially founded as a small protest group but grew into a populist movement. Its name stands for patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West.
