In Sweden, police said at least 15 young women have reported being groped by groups of men on New Year’s Eve in the city of Kalmar.
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But the Cologne police has also come under criticism for its lack of transparency in handling the attacks, with some critics contending that the police department covered up the fact that there were migrants involved in the assaults.
Under Germany’s current laws, asylum seekers are only sent back if the government sentences them to three-year jail terms and deems they will not be in danger if they’re sent back to their countries.
Officials have warned that anti-immigrant groups have been trying to use the attacks to stir up hatred.
Police in the German cities of Hamburg and Stuttgart have said similar crimes were committed during New Year’s Eve festivities, but to a lesser extent.
The spokesman for the Interior Ministry noted that the 31 suspects included only those people sought by the federal police, which was protecting the Cologne train station together with state authorities.
Cologne police said on Friday they had arrested two males aged 16 and 23 with “North African roots” suspected of involvement in the assaults. Among those identified were nine Algerians, eight Moroccans, five Iranians, four Syrians, one Iraqi, one Serb, one American as well as two German citizens.
Wolfgang Albers, 60, was put into “temporary retirement”, said Ralf Jaeger, interior minister for the North Rhine-Westphalia state.
Some of the suspects have been identified by officials as asylum seekers.
Some 1.1 million people registered as asylum seekers in Germany past year. However, Deutsche Welle reports that Chancellor Merkel has said she is now open to changing the law to make expulsion considerably quicker.
A plainclothes police woman says she was among those attacked.
Cologne, a city of about 600,000 people, accepted more than 10,000 refugees in December alone, but some said they now feared a backlash, with Pegida, the anti-Muslim protest movement, set to demonstrate in the city on Saturday.
An internal federal police report obtained by The Wall Street Journal gave a grim glimpse into the disorder that night: Women fled the crowds in tears as passersby stopped to guard them from being raped and “groups of men with migration background” threw fireworks and molested them.
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Victims of the assaults described scenes of chaos outside the station and said dozens of sexual attacks and robberies were carried without sufficient responses from the authorities.
