During the rest of 1 January, several more notifications of sexual assaults or robberies reached the Cologne police. Also the Cologne tabloid Express that day at 21:08 reported the incidents: "New Year's Eve, Central Train Station: Young women sexually harassed". At 13:21, the large local newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger reported: Sexual harassment in the New Year's Eve (…) In the Cologne Central Train Station, several women have been harassed by unknown men". In a press release on 1 January at 08:57 or 11:45, the Cologne police announced that the night had been "mostly peaceful" ( "weitgehend friedlich") – also rendered as: "relaxed" ( "entspannt"). During the night, three emergency calls concerning harassment or robbery near the railway station and the cathedral had reached Cologne police headquarters. One high-ranking Cologne police officer reported that in the evening around 22:00 on 31 December 2015, passers-by in the plaza between the Cologne Central Train Station and the Cologne Cathedral informed police officers on the spot about fights, robberies, and sexual assaults on women taking place in and around the train station The New York Times wrote however that only after midnight did the police hear of the assaults, and the German newspaper Die Welt suggested the same. There are conflicting accounts about when reports of sexual assaults during New Year's Night 2015–16 first reached the Cologne police. By November 2016, around 200 suspects of the sexual assaults had been identified nationwide.ġ January 2016 Cologne's Bahnhofsvorplatz between the central railway station (left) and the city's cathedral (right) was the main site of the sexual assaults and robberies on New Year's Eve 2015–16. By July 2016, the police stated that half of the 120 identified suspects of sexual offences on New Year's Eve had arrived in Germany during the year 2015, most of those 120 had come from North Africa, and four suspects nationwide had been convicted. īy April 2016, statistics recorded by authorities indicated that out of the identified 153 suspects in Cologne who were convicted of sexual offenses and other crimes during New Year's Eve 2015–16, two-thirds were originally from Morocco or Algeria, 44% were asylum seekers, another 12% were likely to have been in Germany illegally, and 3% were underaged unaccompanied refugees. That suggestion was confirmed in a Federal Criminal Police report in June 2016, which also identified five more factors contributing to the occurrence of the attacks: group pressure, absence of police intervention, frustrations of migrants, disinhibition caused by alcohol and/or drug use, and disinhibition due to lack of social ties with German society. Instead, the Cologne police chief suggested that the perpetrators had come from countries where such sexual assaults by groups of men are common. However, by 21 January, the North Rhine-Westphalian government declared that there were no indications of premeditated organized attacks, and on 11 February, the new Cologne police chief stated the same. On 5 January 2016, the German government and the Cologne police speculated that the attacks might have been organized. īy 4 January 2016, the German national media reported that in Cologne, the sexual assaulters had mostly been described as " North African", " Arab", "dark-skinned" and "foreign". The Bundeskriminalamt (German Federal Criminal Police) confirmed in July 2016 that 1,200 women had been sexually assaulted on that New Year's night. In many of the incidents, women in public places had been surrounded and assaulted by groups of men. Over 1,200 women were reportedly sexually assaulted during the 2015–16 public New Year's Eve's celebrations in Germany. Essen: two Perpetrators: The first 120 identified suspects (by July 2016) mostly originated in North Africa (see also §Descriptions of offenders below).
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