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.
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The broadening allegations was rapidly blowing into a full blown crisis that yesterday engulfed Cologne’s police chief Wolfgang Albers, who was dismissed due to “lost trust” in his force following the New Year’s Eve attacks on women by groups of men within a 1,000-strong crowd.
The police’s handling of the events has also been sharply criticised.
Maas said German law allows for asylum seekers to be deported if they are sentenced to a year or more in prison, which is possible with sexual offenses.
Officials have warned that anti-immigrant groups have been trying to use the attacks to stir up hatred.
By Friday, as more women have come forward, Cologne police had received over 200 criminal complaints, mostly alleging sexual offences from groping to two alleged rapes, Spiegel Online reported.
The suspects include nine Algerians, eight Moroccans, four Syrians, five Iranians, one each from Iraq, Serbia and the United States, and two Germans, he said.
“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.
The demonstrators have been ordered to return to a square near Cologne’s main train station, where they set out on a planned march through the city.
They were detained by federal police on suspicion of committing crimes ranging from theft to assault, and in one case verbal abuse of a sexual nature, Interior Ministry spokesman Tobias Plate told reporters in Berlin.
Some 121 women are reported to have been robbed, threatened or sexually assaulted during New Year’s celebrations near the city’s twin-spired Gothic cathedral. He said police have identified 31 suspects.
Mrs Merkel said: “The right to asylum can be lost if someone is convicted on probation or jailed”.
Victims’ description of the perpetrators being of “Arab or North African” descent led many to claim the attackers were refugees, adding fuel to the flames of the already sensitive issue of immigration in Germany (the refugee crisis has seen more than 1.1 million refugees arrive in the country).
Police have documented 32 criminal acts.
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Some of the suspects have been identified by officials as asylum seekers.
