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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Germany said Friday that at least 22 migrants seeking asylum were among the suspects who allegedly carried out sexual assaults and thefts on predominantly women on New Year’s Eve in the city of Cologne.
Heiko Maas, the German justice minister, said “deportations would certainly be conceivable” for those sentenced to a year or more in prison.
The BBC reported that German officials had warned that anti-immigrant groups have been trying to use the attacks to stir up hatred.
According to the same source, other German cities suffered attacks such as Hamburg, in northern Germany, which reported 50 assaults, and Stuttgart.
The suspects include nine Algerian nationals, eight people from Morocco, five from Iran and four from Syria, German interior ministry spokesman Tobias Plate said.
Some 121 women are reported to have been robbed, threatened, or sexually molested by gangs of men of foreign descent as revellers partied near the city’s twin-spired Gothic cathedral.
Right-wing populists have charged that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal migration policy has fuelled crime and destabilised society.
Government spokesman Georg Streiter said Merkel wants “the whole truth” about the events in Cologne and that “nothing should be held back and nothing should be glossed over”.
This story has been corrected to show that there were 31 suspects detained, not 32, and that the accurate spelling of the police chief’s name is Wolfgang, not Wolfang. They are suspected of theft and violence, but not sexual assault.
A statement on the Cologne police force’s Facebook page said that Wolfgang Albers had been ordered to step down by Ralf Jaeger, Germany’s interior minister.
In response to the assaults, Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) have called for tougher penalties against offending asylum seekers, according to a draft paper seen by Reuters ahead of a meeting of the party leadership in Mainz. Police have laid no charges but pointed to more than 30 suspects, nearly all of them migrants and including many asylum seekers.
Albers came under fire after it emerged that his officers had been short-staffed and ill-equipped to prevent the crimes, which prompted around 170 complaints mainly of a sexual nature, including two allegations of rape.
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With the extent of the assaults only coming to light on Monday, three days after the attacks, police have also been accused of hushing up the cases.
