The mass attacks on women in Cologne and other German cities on New Year’s Eve have prompted more than 500 criminal complaints, with Cologne investigations focused largely on asylum seekers or illegal migrants from north Africa, police have said.
The attacks, mostly targeting women and ranging from theft to sexual molestation, have prompted a highly-charged debate in Germany about its open-door policy to migrants and refugees, more than one million of whom came to the country last year.
In Cologne, police said that 379 criminal complaints had been filed by individuals or groups, while police in Hamburg said 133 similar complaints had been lodged in the north German city.
Frankfurt also registered complaints, although far fewer.


A migrant woman and her child wait for a bus at a transit camp in southern Serbian town of Presevo.

German Justice Minister Heiko Maas believes that the attacks on women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve were organised, according to comments in yesterday’s edition of the Bild newspaper.
“When such a horde meets to commit crimes, it seems to have been planned in some way. Nobody can tell me that it wasn’t co-ordinated or pre-prepared,” Maas was quoted in the popular tabloid as saying.
Maas was also not prepared to rule out a connection between the Cologne attacks and those on women in other German cities on the same night.
“All links must be very carefully examined. The suspicion seems likely that a certain date and the number of people to be expected were selected,” he told Bild.
Maas was echoing comments he had made earlier in the week.
At the same time Maas warned people not to draw conclusions about how law-abiding migrants are from the attacks.
“To infer from someone’s background that he is more likely to commit a crime or not, I find to be risky,” he said.


A rescue worker aids a migrant, who was part of a group of 45 intercepted aboard a makeshift boat, upon arriving at Arguineguin port in the Canary Island of Gran Canaria, Spain.

He also said it was totally wrong to make any connection between the excesses of New Year’s Eve in Cologne and the arrival of over 1mn refugees in Germany in 2015.
“Of course there are among the more than 1mn people those who commit crimes, but there is no indication that the number of crimes has risen disproportionately since the influx,” Maas added.
The Cologne attacks also heated up debates on immigration in neighbouring Austria and Switzerland.
“What happened in Cologne is unbelievable and unacceptable,” Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner, a member of the conservative People’s Party that is junior coalition partner to the Social Democrats, told newspaper Oesterreich.
There had been a handful of similar incidents in the border city of Salzburg.
“Such offenders should be deported,” she said, backing a similar suggestion by German chancellor Angela Merkel.
Swiss media contained numerous stories about sexual assaults on women by foreigners, fuelling tensions ahead of a referendum next month that would trigger the automatic deportation for up to 15 years of foreigners convicted of some crimes.
In Cologne, around 40% of the complaints included sexual offences, including two rapes, police said, as a 100-strong force of officers continued their investigations.
No one has yet been charged.
“There have been arrests and we will continue to make arrests,” a spokeswoman for the Cologne police said yesterday.
She said police had increased the number of officers on patrol. “It is then to be determined whether or not these people were involved on New Year’s Eve.”
In an earlier statement, the city’s police had said the suspects in the focus of their investigation “come largely from north African countries” and the investigation “concerns largely asylum seekers and people who are staying in Germany illegally”.
Gathering evidence is difficult, given the chaotic and crowded scenes on the night, when police were overwhelmed by the mass assaults.
The attacks triggered demonstrations in Cologne on Saturday, one of which was organised by the anti-Islam Pegida movement.
The far-right has seized on the alleged involvement of migrants in the Cologne attacks as proof that German chancellor Merkel’s welcoming stance to migrants is flawed.
Some in that crowd threw bottles and fire crackers at officers, and riot police used water cannon to disperse the protesters.