The men suspected of attacking women in Cologne, Germany on New Year's Eve were "almost exclusively" from a migrant background, mainly North Africans and Arabs, an official report says. North Rhine-Westphalia's interior minister Ralf Jaeger accused Cologne police of making "serious mistakes".Rico says combatting it is simple: take all the wogs and send them back where they came from...(And if there's a phrase for it in Arabic, it means it's commonplace.)
More than five hundred criminal complaints have been filed, with forty percent alleging sexual assault, relating to 31 December 2015.
The Pope said Europe's "humanistic spirit" risked being undermined. The "immense influx" of migrants was causing problems, he said, but the continent had the means to strike a balance between protecting its citizens and helping migrants.
Jaeger said that recent arrivals in Germany were among the suspects in the attacks, which took place in central Cologne, in the area of the cathedral and the main railway station (photo).
The scale of the assaults has shocked Germany. Nineteen individuals are currently under investigation by the state police in connection with the attacks, North Rhine-Westphalia's interior ministry says in a report, none of them German nationals.
Those nineteen suspects include fourteen men from Morocco and Algeria. Ten of the suspects are asylum seekers, nine of whom arrived in Germany after September of 2015. The other nine are possibly in Germany illegally, the interior ministry says.
On Friday it emerged that, of the thirty-one suspects identified by Federal police, who are responsible for the station itself, eighteen are asylum seekers, including nine Algerians and eight Moroccans.
Jaeger is himself under political pressure. On Friday he fired Cologne's police chief, Wolfgang Albers.
Addressing a committee of state MPs on Monday, Jaeger criticized the police for not calling for reinforcements, and also for the way they informed the public about the investigation in the days after the events. His report details how a group of around a thousand men of North African and Arabic origin gathered in the area on the evening of 31 December. From this large group, smaller groups of men formed, who then surrounded women and threatened and attacked them, he said. These smaller groups were predominately made up of North African men who had travelled to Cologne from different cities.
"After their intoxication with drugs and alcohol came violence," said Jaeger. "It culminated in the acting out of fantasies of sexual omnipotence. That must be severely punished."
Around a million asylum seekers arrived in Germany in 2015, and Chancellor Angela Merkel's immigration policy has come under criticism since the attacks.
On Sunday evening, six Pakistanis and a Syrian man came under attack in the center of Cologne. In the first attack, a group of around twenty people attacked six Pakistanis, two of whom had to be treated in the local hospital. Separately, five people injured a Syrian man, who did not need hospital treatment.
Justice Minister Heiko Maas condemned those attacks, saying: "As abominable as the crimes in Cologne and other cities were, one thing remains clear: there is no justification for blanket agitation against foreigners." He said it appeared that some people "appear just to have been waiting for the events of Cologne".
The report into the attacks in Cologne says that the combination of group sexual violence with robbery had not previously been seen in Germany. It notes that similar crimes did take place in other parts of Germany on 31 December, including in Hamburg.
The report describes a modus operandi, known as taharrush gamea in Arabic, meaning group sexual harassment in crowds, and compares it to incidents reported in Cairo's Tahrir Square at the time of the Egyptian revolution.
A joint Federal and state working group has been set up to examine the phenomenon and how to combat it.
11 January 2016
Predators in Germany
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