German Chancellor Angela Merkel proposed changes to immigration laws to make it easier to deport immigrants who commit crimes after a series of sex attacks rocked Cologne over the new year.
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Asylum seekers are now sent back only if they have been handed a sentence of at least three years and the situation in their countries is not putting their own lives at risk.
Meanwhile German officials have warned that anti-immigrant groups have been trying to use the attacks to stir up hatred.
The Cologne suspects include nine Algerian nationals, eight people from Morocco, five from Iran and four from Syria, German interior ministry spokesman Tobias Plate said.
A plainclothes police woman said she was among those attacked.
German news reports said two people, one aged 16 and another 23, were arrested overnight in connection with the attacks.
Separately, police claim to have identified a total of 34 suspects, 21 of whom are asylum seekers, with a lot of them being recent arrivals.
And Wolfgang Albers, Cologne’s chief of police, has since been removed from his post.
The police’s handling of the night’s events has been sharply criticised.
“For the mostly Arabic offenders, sexual assault was the priority, or, to express it from their point of view, their sexual amusement was the priority”.
“Primarily, this is not about refugees but about criminality”, he said, noting that most asylum seekers in Germany had come seeking protection.
Albers acknowledged that mistake earlier this week, but he dismissed widespread criticism that his officers reacted too slowly in response to reports of assaults and harassment of women.
These offenses are mainly about bodily injury and thefts, he said, adding that the asylum seekers were not previously associated with sexual offenses.
“People rightly want to know what happened on New Year’s Eve, they want to know who the assailants were, and they want to know how such attacks can be prevented in the future”, said Jaeger, sending the 60-year-old into “early retirement” as Germans usually treat such dismissals.
Merkel has steadfastly refused to agree to establish a cap on newcomers, but the CDU proposal did note that “a continuation of the current influx would overwhelm the state and society even in a country like Germany in the long run”, the dpa news agency reported.
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Moreover, In Zurich, Switzerland, six women denounced they were “robbed from one side, [while] being groped … on the other side” men described as “having dark skin”, according to a Zurich Police statement released on Friday.
