Arrests made after horrific Cologne sex attacks

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party on Saturday Jan. 9, 2016 proposed stricter laws regulating asylum seekers after a string of New Year’s Eve sexual assaults and robberies in Cologne blamed largely on foreigners.

The apparent policy U-turn comes following reports of mass sexual assault and a number of rapes allegedly undertaken by men from among a group of more than a thousand in Cologne on New Year’s Eve.

The city’s chief of police was sacked for his handling of the incidents amid claims officers covered up the involvement of large groups of migrants. Cologne police now say that they are seeking 18 asylum-seekers among the 31 suspects that they have currently identified in connection to the New Year’s Eve attacks.

Three crimes were related to sexual assaults, the ministry spokesman said, but added that police had not yet identified suspects in the specific cases.

Of the 31 suspects that were briefly detained by German authorities, nine are Algerian nationals, eight are from Morocco, five from Iran, four from Syria and one person each from Iraq, Serbia and the U.S.

A 23-year-old Syrian citizen was arrested in the city’s Old Town section on New Year’s Eve after sending fireworks in the direction of a 17-year-old student, police said.

The German newspaper Der Spiegel ran a report in which it said one member of the crowd told a police officer he was Syrian and needed to be treated well because Merkel had invited him to the country.

Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday backed a sharp toughening of expulsion rules for convicted refugees, saying that even those who have been given suspended sentences should be required to leave Germany.

Analysts say the assaults have raised doubts over whether Germany, which took in 1.1 million refugees a year ago, can continue embracing so many refugees.

Some 1,700 supporters of right-wing group Pegida gathered in Cologne to demand action a week after scores of women reported being assaulted as they passed through a group of 1,000 men in front of the city’s main train station.

Investigators are trawling through CCTV footage and examining witness accounts to determine whether the suspects were implicated, police said.

The state’s interior minister, Ralf Jaeger, said the move was “necessary to restore public trust and the Cologne police’s ability to act, with a view to upcoming major events”.

Discomfort in her own party at her welcoming asylum seekers continues to bubble under the surface, he writes. Police in Hamburg received sexual harassment complaints from 70 women. “If we now take all the refugees into custody, if we erect fences around our homes and country, if we join the swing to the right that some of our neighbors have, then we give up all we have achieved”.