German intelligence agency to monitor anti-migrant PEGIDA movement

The anti-Islam and xenophobic PEGIDA movement is to be monitored by the German domestic intelligence agency at state level, the agency's head in the eastern state of Saxony said on Friday.

According to the Agency for the Protection of the Constitution, as the domestic intelligence agency is known, PEGIDA forms "an inescapable component of the right-wing extremist environment".

PEGIDA, which started out in late 2014 as a protest movement against what it saw as the increased Islamisation of German society thanks to immigration and asylum seekers, had "evolved into an anti-constitutional movement over the years," the agency's head in Saxony, Dirk-Martin Christian, said in the state capital of Dresden.

The founder of PEGIDA, Lutz Bachmann, immediately announced that PEGIDA would take legal action against the decision, which allows the agency to collect information on selected persons under strict conditions.

Saxony's Christian Democrat Interior Minister Roland Woeller welcomed the move as "long overdue", while stressing that those wishing to demonstrate peacefully would not be monitored in this way.

PEGIDA gained national and international prominence with its Monday marches in Dresden and elsewhere from late 2014. The movement reached its peak in January 2015, when some 25,000 joined its walk through the Saxon capital. The movement has since gone into decline, as the flow of migrants into Germany has ebbed following a large influx in the summer of 2015.    (dpa)