The Kleinmachnow lioness: a phone video, a police sighting and a 30-hour big cat hunt on the edge of Berlin

July 2023. Kleinmachnow sits in the Potsdam-Mittelmark district of Brandenburg, less than five kilometres from Berlin. Forests run along the southern Berlin state border. For about 30 hours, it was the centre of a lion hunt.

The night of Wednesday 19 to Thursday 20 July. Around midnight. Two passers-by saw what appeared to be a lioness chasing a wild boar down a street. They filmed it on a phone. The clip was short and grainy, shot in the dark. It showed a large animal creeping between bushes and trees. It had no mane. So they called it a lioness.

The person who filmed it was later described as a 19-year-old man. He has never been named. He sent the clip to friends, and a father called the police. Brandenburg police treated the video as genuine. Then spokeswoman Kerstin Schroeder confirmed something more. Officers had seen the animal themselves.

The alarm went out in the early hours of Thursday. A loose, dangerous animal. Most likely a lioness. Residents were told to stay inside and keep pets and farm animals in. Children at daycare centres stayed indoors. Market traders were asked not to set up. Mayor Michael Grubert said it was no time "to go jogging in the woods".

Helicopters flew. Drones and thermal cameras swept the forest. Armed officers, hunters, vets and sniffer dogs followed. Police checked zoos, circuses, shelters and a private keeper. Nothing was missing. On Friday a possible sighting came in from Berlin-Zehlendorf, and the search moved with it. Residents there heard a roar. It was teenagers, playing it through a Bluetooth speaker.

Friday 21 July. Midday. Grubert faced the press. "By all human judgment, we assume it is not a lioness." Two experts had compared the video with lion images and found marked differences. Biologists said the back was too flat in its curvature for a big cat. Derk Ehlert was blunt: "I see two wild boars running from left to right in this video." A lion, he said, leaves tracks. No paw print was found. No prey remains either. Achim Gruber of the Institute of Animal Pathology in Berlin called it completely unthinkable that the dogs would have found nothing if a boar had been eaten.

The lab had the last word. Droppings collected in Nikolassee contained DNA that was 100% wild boar. A hair sample, sent to the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, was clearly from a wild boar too. The final results were reported on 27 July.

Not everyone was convinced. Vet Michaela Ebeling said the head in the video looked short and round, with round ears, like a big cat's. "That would be a very mutated wild boar." The young man who filmed it still did not see a pig. "I can't imagine that." The cost drew its own debate. Police union deputy chair Heiko Teggatz called it "the most expensive safari ever in Germany's forests". Interior minister Michael Stübgen called the measures absolutely appropriate. Operation leader Peter Foitzik called the scale proportionate.

Kleinmachnow took it with a wink. The town planned to sponsor a lion at Zoo Eberswalde, with a granite plaque bearing its name. The supervisory authority objected, and in November 2023 the gesture became a €500 donation. The case now sits beside the Nottingham lion of 1976. Another phantom lion. Another police hunt. And a grainy clip that still divides those who have seen it.