Cologne police on Sunday said they had now recorded more than 500 cases of New Year’s Eve violence blamed on refugees and migrants, piling fresh pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel over her liberal stance toward refugees.
Marking a sharp jump from the caseload of 379 given on Saturday, police said 516 complaints had now been lodged — of which 40 percent are related to sexual assault.
Witnesses described terrifying scenes of hundreds of women running a gauntlet of groping hands, lewd insults and robberies in the mob violence.
Photo: EPA
Although no formal charges have been laid, Cologne police have said those suspected over the rampage near the city’s railway station were mostly asylum seekers and illegal migrants from North Africa. The scale of the Cologne assaults has shocked Germany and put a spotlight on the 1.1 million refugees who arrived in the country last year.
It has also fueled fear, with a poll published by the Bild am Sonntag newspaper saying that 39 percent of those surveyed felt police did not provide sufficient protection, while 57 percent did.
Just under half (49 percent) of respondents believed the same sort of mob violence could hit their hometowns, reported the newspaper which headlined its article with the question: “Is the New Year Eve scandal the result of wrong policies?”
Turning away from her mantra of “we will manage this” over the record migrant influx, Merkel has been forced to change tack.
She took a tough line on Saturday, saying she backed changes to the law to make it easier to expel asylum seekers convicted of a crime.
“If the law does not suffice, then the law must be changed,” she said.
“Cologne has changed everything, people now are doubting,” Christian Democratic Union Party vice president Volker Bouffier said.
German Minister for Justice Heiko Maas said he believed the violence in the western city of Cologne was organized.
“For such a horde of people to meet and commit such crimes, it has to have been planned somehow,” he told the Bild am Sonntag.
“No one can tell me that this was not coordinated or planned. The suspicion is that a specific date and an expected crowd was picked,” he said.
Quoting confidential police reports, Bild am Sonntag said some North Africans had sent out calls using social networks for people to gather in Cologne on New Year’s Eve.
Separately in Hamburg, police said they had received 133 criminal complaints for similar violence during the northern city’s own New Year’s Eve celebrations.
With thousands of asylum seekers streaming into Germany every day since last year, Merkel has already come under fire from critics, even within her own conservative alliance, who want her to reverse her open-door policy to war refugees.
Merkel had until now not wavered from her stance, even using her new year’s address to tell Germans that the record influx was “an opportunity for tomorrow.”
However, after Cologne, she has adopted a harsher tone, saying also that “we must speak again about the cultural fundamentals of our co-existence.”
Bit by bit, the government has begun to tighten up checks, including reinstating individual interviews in asylum applications for Syrians since Jan. 1, which had earlier been waived.
Balkan states have already been designated safe countries of origin — a category which meant that citizens would not usually be granted asylum — and Algeria and Morocco could soon join that list.
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