New Year’s Eve Sex Attacks: 2,000 Attackers, Only 120 Suspects

A new report from German police indicates that 1,200 women were victims of sexual assault by over 2,000 mostly migrant men, but only 120 suspects have been identified.

A new police report from the German Federal police (BKA) has revealed that across Germany on New Year’s Eve, in Cologne, Stuttgart, and other cities, over 1,200 women were sexually assaulted. Although the report estimates the number of potential attackers to be over 2,000 men, police have so far only identified 120 men, mostly migrants, and have little faith they will ever find the remaining 1,880, Süddeutsche Zeitung reports.

BKA president Holger Münch noted that the sexual assault gangs, known in the Arab world as “Taharrush”, were a completely new phenomenon for German authorities and as such they have struggled with investigations into the assaults.

The report breaks down the cases by city. Cologne experienced the largest number of sexual assaults, with a total of 650 women whose cases the police deemed to have merit.  There were a further 400 assaults in Hamburg, and the remaining attacks were reported in cities such as Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, and others.

Of the 1,200 crimes reported in the BKA survey, 642 were exclusively of a sexual nature with only 47 suspects identified in those cases. Most offences, according to the BKA, were a combination of sexual assault and robbery of which they counted 239 offences and only 73 suspects, the vast majority of them migrants from the North African region.

BKA president Mr. Münch also admitted that the vast majority of the migrants who participated in the sex assaults had been in Germany for less than a year meaning that they had come into Germany during the migrant crisis. “In this respect there is already a relationship between the occurrence of the phenomenon and the strong immigration in 2015,” he commented, contradicting the media and politicians who have attempted to downplay the connection of migrants to the sex assaults.

Though police have identified 120 migrant men who took part in the sex assaults, to date only four have been put on trial. The latest conviction ended with a North African migrant receiving a suspended sentence.  As the sex attacker left the courtroom a free man he was photographed laughing at the verdict.

Mr. Münch stated that the BKA didn’t believe that the attacks were organised by criminal groups, but rather they took place on the spur of the moment, saying that the police had “no evidence” that the attacks were linked to organised crime. However, German Interior Minister Heiko Maas had insinuated that organised crime could have been a factor in the sex attacks shortly after the news broke in January.