German authorities said Monday that nearly all suspects in the New Year’s Eve violence against women in Cologne were “of foreign origin”, as police blamed far-right thugs for reprisal attacks.
The men who groped and robbed women in the chaotic year-end festivities emerged from a crowd of over 1,000 “Arab and North African” men near Cologne’s main railway station, said Ralf Jaeger, interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia state.
Witness accounts and police reports indicated that “nearly all the people who committed these crimes were of foreign origin,” including many recently arrived refugees, he said, adding however that still no formal charges had been laid.
The sexual violence that marred the start of 2016 has shocked Germany and piled pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel over her liberal stance towards refugees, after 1.1 million arrived last year from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries.
Far-right groups have vented their rage against both Merkel and migrants at street protests, while xenophobic mobs were blamed for a spate of attacks against Pakistani, Syrian and African men in Cologne on Sunday night.
Police said groups linked to Cologne’s extremist hooligan scene had used social media to organise gatherings in the inner city Sunday evening, among them known far-right extremists and members of a local biker gang.
In one attack, some 25 men chased a man of African appearance who ran to seek protection among a group of six Pakistanis. “The pursuers then beat and kicked these young Pakistani men,” said crime division chief Norbert Wagner.
Justice Minister Heiko Maas warned that “those who now hound refugees -- on the Internet or on the streets -- have obviously just been waiting for the events of Cologne” and were now “shamelessly exploiting” the attacks.
Jaeger also warned that “to label certain groups and stigmatise them as sexual offenders is not just wrong, but dangerous.”
Undeterred, thousands of protesters braved cold rain to rally against refugees in the eastern German city of Leipzig Monday evening, separated by police from leftist counter-demonstrators.
“We are the people”, “Resistance!” and “Deport them!”, chanted the flag-waving crowd at the rally of LEGIDA, the local chapter of xenophobic group PEGIDA, the “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident”.
“Refugees not welcome!” read one sign, showing a silhouette of three men armed with knives pursuing a woman, while another declared “Islam = terror”.
- Turning point? -
In Rome, Pope Francis urged European governments to keep welcoming migrants while acknowledging security and other concerns.
He said the sheer size of the influx was causing “inevitable problems”, as well as “fears about security, further exacerbated by the growing threat of international terrorism”.
But the pontiff called on European leaders not to lose “the values and principles of humanity ... however much they may prove, in some moments of history, a burden difficult to bear.”
The scale of the New Year’s Eve assaults has shocked Germany and put a spotlight on the record influx.
Witnesses described terrifying scenes of hundreds of women running a gauntlet of groping hands, lewd insults, robberies and even rapes.
Police said more than 500 complaints had been lodged since, 40 percent of them related to sexual assault.
“It’s not premature to speak of a turning point (after Cologne), or at least the reinforcing of a trend that had already started to take shape lately,” Andreas Roedder, contemporary history professor at Mainz University, told AFP.
Cologne police have come under pressure not just for failing to prevent the violence, but also for initially failing to report the extent of the carnage.
Swedish police were also criticised on Monday after admitting they failed to release information about alleged sexual assaults against women by young immigrants at a Stockholm summer music festival over the past two years.
There were 38 reports of rape and sexual assault filed after the We Are Sthlm festival, which uses the postal abbreviation for Stockholm, in 2014 and 2015, according to police.
The allegations were first made public in a report by the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, citing internal police memos.
“We certainly should have publicly released this information, no doubt,” police spokesman Varg Gyllander told AFP. “Why it did not happen we simply do not know.”