UPDATE: More details are emerging involving a large crowd of men who sexually assaulted some 60 women at a major train station in Germany.
Der Express, a large German publication, reported that police were greatly outnumbered and were not able to save some women from the crowd. Police said to a 20-year-old woman they pulled from the crowd who had her pants and underwear torn off; “Your three girlfriends, we could not save them from the throng, because we ourselves have been pelted with firecrackers.”
As to who is responsible for the horrific crimes, police officers arrested 8 men from the crowd at one point, and all had “residence certificates for asylum procedures,” meaning they were Syrian refugees or refugees from similar countries.
EARLIER:
BERLIN (AP) — German police have described a series of sexual assaults against women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve as “a completely new dimension of crime.”
Officers received numerous complaints from women who said they had been assaulted around Cologne’s main train station next to the western German city’s famous cathedral on the night from Thursday to Friday.
Cologne police chief Wolfgang Albers says witnesses described the assaults as coming from a group of up to 1,000 men whose appearance indicated they were of “Arab or North African origin.”
Some 60 criminal complaints have so far been filed, including one allegation of rape.
German news agency dpa quoted Albers telling reporters on Monday that it was “an intolerable situation that such crimes are committed in the middle of the city.”
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