Thread: Germany stunned by rash of New Year's sex assaults

Germany is STUNNED!, stunned I say. What did they expect? All they had to do was look at Sweden, or listen to what the jihadis actually were saying about raping European women before they got there. Islam is a culture of rape and genocide. The government puts out a bunch of tippy toe don't blame the "migrant" BS and expects people to believe them JMO
Germany stunned by rash of New Year's sex assaults

The German government Tuesday condemned dozens of apparently coordinated sexual assaults against women on New Year's Eve in the western city of Cologne blamed on Arab men but warned against anti-migrant scapegoating.

Justice Minister Heiko Mass called for a thorough investigation of the rash of attacks, ranging from groping to at least one reported rape, allegedly committed in a large crowd of revellers during year-end festivities at the city's main train station.
"This represents a new dimension of crime that we will have to get to grips with," he told reporters, adding that the assaults had appeared to be "coordinated".

"The authorities are working intensively to determine who was behind this."

Asked by a journalist whether the attackers could have been refugees, Maas said police were still working to identify them.
"This is not about where someone is from but what they did," he said.

"Making an issue out of it, lumping it together with the refugee issue, is nothing but exploitation. Now is the time to determine the facts and then decide on the necessary consequences."

Police in Cologne said they had received 90 criminal complaints by Tuesday and quoted witnesses as saying that groups of 20-30 young men "who appeared to be of Arab origin" had surrounded victims, assaulted them and in several cases robbed them.

"We assume more people will come forward," a police spokesman told German news agency DPA.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said he was also stunned by the "despicable" attacks.

"However this must not lead to refugees of whatever origin, who are seeking our protection from persecution, being placed under general suspicion."

Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker called a crisis meeting with political officials and police Tuesday after the case made national headlines.

In mid-October, Reker was stabbed in the neck in an attack apparently over her welcoming stance toward refugees.
Germany took in around one million asylum seekers in 2015, most of them fleeing war-ravaged Syria.

Chancellor Angela Merkel in her televised New Year's address rallied Germans to continue to welcome the newcomers despite mounting criticism and reject right-wing populists whipping up anti-migrant sentiment.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/...lts/ar-AAgnBTP

Mass Sexual Attack in Germany Inflames Migrant Debate

The New York Times

By MELISSA EDDY6 hrs ago

BERLIN — German authorities said on Tuesday that coordinated attacks in which young women were sexually harassed and robbed by hundreds of young men on New Year’s Eve in the western city of Cologne were unprecedented in scale and nature.

The assault, which went largely unreported for days, set off a national outcry after the Cologne police described the attackers as young men “who appeared to have a North African or Arabic” background, based on testimony from victims and witnesses. More than 90 people have filed legal complaints, the police said on Tuesday.

The police in Hamburg also said that 10 women had reported being sexually assaulted and robbed in a similar fashion on the same night, and they urged witnesses to come forward.

Germany took in more than one million migrants last year, and with the country struggling to deal with the political, social and wider consequences of the influx, the delayed public response has led to concerns that the authorities were playing down the seriousness of the assault to prevent it from becoming a point of contention in the broader debate.

The assault took place late on Thursday on the vast public square in front of the city’s main train station, a central transit point for anyone coming or going from a fireworks display over the Rhine and the bars and nightclubs in the heart of the city, in the shadow of its landmark cathedral.

Heiko Maas, Germany’s justice minister, warned on Tuesday against linking the assaults to the influx of refugees, saying that the ethnicity of the perpetrators was irrelevant.

“The rule of the law does not look at where someone comes from but what they did,” Mr. Maas told reporters in Berlin. “We will investigate what circles the perpetrators may have come from.”

The Cologne police say they believe several hundred men, ages 15 to 35, were involved in the violence that began in the early hours of the New Year, after the square was cleared because men had been throwing firecrackers into the crowd.

Wolfgang Albers, Cologne’s chief of police, said the assaults had taken place in the chaos that followed, as the square was emptied. The men appeared to have broken into smaller groups, the police said, with each one encircling a woman; while some would grope the victim, others would steal her wallet or cellphone.

One victim reported that she had been raped, the police said.

Henriette Reker, Cologne’s mayor, called a crisis meeting on Tuesday to address the issue. Ms. Reker, who was stabbed during a campaign event in October by an attacker who opposed her welcoming attitude toward migrants, called the assault “absolutely intolerable” and pledged her support for the authorities’ investigation.

The city holds a large festival every year before Easter, when thousands of costumed revelers throng the streets to celebrate with parades and parties, and Ms. Reker echoed the concerns of many about safety during the Carnival season.

In an effort to prevent further violence, Ms. Reker said that city officials would begin working on measures to help young women protect themselves and to explain the city’s attitudes and norms to its many newcomers.

“We will explain our Carnival much better to people who come from other cultures,” she said, “so there won’t be any confusion about what constitutes celebratory behavior in Cologne, which has nothing to do with a sexual frankness.”

Cologne, with roughly one million inhabitants, is among Germany’s most ethnically diverse cities, and it took in more than 10,000 refugees last year, many of them young men from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The city authorities said they would increase security after the assaults, as they continued to search for suspects.

The euphoria that accompanied the first wave of arrivals in Germany this summer has since given way to growing unease about the difficulty of integrating hundreds of thousands of people of a different religion and who were raised in a different culture.

Far-right and anti-immigrant groups in Germany, and others who oppose the influx, swiftly seized on the episode, saying it demonstrated the dangers associated with accepting huge numbers of migrants.

Lutz Bachmann, head of the anti-immigrant Pegida movement, accused German leaders on Twitter of complicity in the assault. In a post that named Ms. Merkel; her deputy, Sigmar Gabriel; and other politicians, Mr. Bachmann said, “You are all responsible for the abuse in Cologne!”

Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose unmitigated support for a migrant flow that has increasingly put her country under strain and caused political rifts in her own conservative bloc, used an annual event on Tuesday to call for mutual respect.

“We are all of the understanding that we respect everyone, even those who we don’t know,” the chancellor said in Berlin, where she greeted groups of children who celebrated the Epiphany by dressing up as three kings and collecting donations for charity or their churches.

The chancellor recalled that the country’s Constitution enshrines human dignity as inviolable. “This is true not only for Germans, but for all people,” she said.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/...ate/ar-AAgowzs

Muslim "refugee" rape gangs!

W

Dah..... it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out 'Civilized Western Culture' + 'Violent Islamic Ideology' = ?????

Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Dusseldorf… New Year’s Migrant Sex Assault In Every Major German City

by OLIVER LANE
6 Jan 2016
563 comments

German capital city Berlin has joined the sad parade of cities touched by migrant sex violence on New Year’s Eve, with hundreds of assaults now reported to police in Cologne and other cities.

Although on a smaller scale to the unrestrained and un-policed sex attacks in Cologne, the Berliner Morgenpost has now reported on assaults taking place on the street “in front of the Brandenburg gate”.

The revelation may prove difficult for the German media, which until now has stressed in most reports on the new year’s rapes that Berlin was not caught up in the scandal.

The paper reports four separate incidents around the cite, including a tourist being sexually assaulted by a group of “three to five men”, and two women being “sexually harassed” by men from Pakistan and Iraq.

Another woman came forward to police on Tuesday following national press coverage of the migrant rape scandal to report being “touched” at a music event by “several immoral men”.

More analagous to the Cologne attacks were events in Hamburg, where groups of “southern or Arab appearance” men aged between 20 and 40 sexually assaulted dozens of women.

Police have recieved 53 complaints of harrasment relating to new year’s eve so far, including 39 of sexual harassment. One 19 year old girl identified by the pseudonym of ‘Lotta’ went out to celebrate the new year in a ‘chic’ dress and high heels.

Spiegel reports their comments when they related while walking between two clubs, they were warned by a bouncer not to go down a particular street, to do so “would be your death”. Despite the warning Lotta and her girlfriends walked down the road but became separated by the men. She said: “I was suddenly alone… 20 to 30 men were standing around me… every time a hand went away, already arrived the next… I felt helpless”.

Having been assaulted under her dress, her hair pulled, and finally thrown to the ground, Lotta met up with her friends, who had all been treated similarly by other groups of men. The girl told Spiegel she thought they were “foreign origin”.

In Stuttgart two 18 year old women were assaulted and robbed by a gang of 15 men reports the Stuttgarter Zeitung, as well as an unspecified number of other “mostly young women” victims. The state prosecutor warned against making comparisons between Stuttgart and Cologne, remarkng “The incidents in both cities vary greatly in their dimensions”.

Düsseldorf saw at least eleven sexual assaults in the historic city centre by “North African” men. In contrast to Stuttgart a police source here was less reticent to admit the scale of the problem, admitting “The nature of the offenses with which is comparable in Cologne”.

Breitbart London was the first English language news site to report on the Cologne sex attacks this week, the events having been obscured by German news media until large numbers of women coming forward to report rapes and sexual abuse and on-line discussion forced events.

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016...r-german-city/

Video at source link
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by JOHN SEXTON
6 Jan 2016

One of the dozens of women who was groped by members of a mob in Cologne, Germany on New Year’s Eve described the attack but turned her back to cameras to protect her identity.

The unidentified woman described the scene, her voice shaking with tears,”We were fondled, I was groped between my legs. My friends also were fondled. My boyfriend tried to pull me away. There was quite a big group of people, maybe thirty or forty.”

The woman is just one of 120 people who have filed complaints with police about a group of young men of “Arab or North African” appearance. On New Year’s Eve the men fired fireworks into the crowd of people in a plaza located between the train station and the Cathedral. Dozens of women were groped and at least two report being raped. Many others were victims of theft, apparently of the same mob.

The attack has sent ripples through German society, which took in nearly a million asylum seeking immigrants last year from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has pushed Germans to welcome the new immigrants, has said she is outraged by the attacks.

Authorities have been quick to say there is no evidence the New Year’s Eve attacks were carried out by recent immigrants, but police and witnesses did confirm the ethnic identity of the men in question.

Many have noted that news of the mass of attacks on women seemed to come out rather slowly after the event, as if authorities did not want to publicize what had happened.

Similar assaults were reported in two other cities in Germany on New Year’s Eve, though the number of victims was much smaller in those cases.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...x-assault-mob/

by OLIVER LANE
6 Jan 2016
3,966 comments

Victims of the Cologne New Year’s Eve migrant sex abuse gangs have told of the harrowing attacks they were subjected to this weekend, as it emerges a total of 118 Germans have now come forward to police to report having been assaulted.

Although the story was initially ignored in the German news media, details began to emerge of the shocking attacks on Monday during a police conference called to deal with the complaints of abuse and police negligence circulating on social media, as Breitbart London revealed to the English-speaking world at the time.

Even large groups of girls travelling together were not spared by the migrants at Cologne railway station and in other German cities, as gangs of up to 40 men moved to attack at once in the early hours of new year’s day. Michelle, an 18-year-old German woman, was walking to the station at 11-PM on new year’s eve with a group of friends when they were attacked. N-TV reports her words:

“We were eleven people on the go. At eleven o’clock we were at the main station and walked to the Rhine in order there to watch the fireworks. Even then we already noticed many men.

“We were at the cathedral and from there walked to the Ludwig Museum and passed down to the Rhine. There were suddenly 20 to 30 men who surrounded us, and more and more came.”

The men then moved in and, despite their screaming out, began to molest the group of girls. Getting through their thick winter clothes, the girls told the television station about being touched on the legs, back, buttocks, and upper body. She said they protested, but the men didn’t appear to understand German. “They were all foreigners,” said Michelle.

In tears after their ordeal, the girls later realised after their escape that they had been stripped of their mobile phones, purses, cigarettes, and electronics. They were unable to find a police officer to report the incident to.

German newspaper Bild reports the testimonies of other young victims. Using pseudonyms to protect the idenities of the young women involved, the paper reports the words of 18-year-old Annika who said of her first-ever trip to Cologne: “It was scary. Mainly because a nobody helped. I feel so dirty. So used.”

“They all looked foreign. They managed to separate us in the crowd and got close to us… we tried to fight off their hands…. everywhere I looked I saw girls crying and being comforted,” she said. Annika also added that her friends’ purses had all been rifled during the ordeal; and when she found a police officer later to report the assault, he just told her to go to a police station.

Another young woman, 25-year-old Anne who was waiting tables at a night club, said she went outside for fresh air during a break in her shift and was attacked by a group of Arab men. They pulled her dress and tore her panties off before running away.

One man spoke of his experience as he was walking up the road with his 31-year-old girlfriend. Unable to protect her as they were absorbed in an “artificial stampede” of “young, dark-haired men,” his girlfriend was “attacked in the crotch.” He dragged her to a nearby nightclub to seek refuge. Two other unnamed women suffered a worse fate — both 20-years-old. While out partying together, one of them had every item of clothing torn from her body and the other was “abused with fingers.”

Breitbart London reported on Monday of the story of Katja L, the first woman to come forward to tell her story and precipitate the media attention that has finally reached the attacks, which remained buried for days after the event. She said: “When we came out of the station, we were very surprised by the group that met us there,” before confirming that the group was “exclusively young foreign men.”

“We then walked through this group of men. There was an alley through [the men] which we walked through. Suddenly I felt a hand on my buttocks, then on my breasts; in the end, I was groped everywhere. It was a nightmare. Although we shouted and beat them, the guys did not stop. I was desperate and think I was touched around 100 times in the 200 meters.

“Fortunately I wore a jacket and trousers. a skirt would probably have been torn away from me.”

Cologne police announced they had made three arrests this morning in relation to the attacks, but just an hour later withdrew their statement saying it had been in error, and in fact they only had “suspects” at this time.

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016...olognevictims/

'Cover-up' over Cologne sex assaults blamed on migration sensitivities

Police and media have been accused of silence on wave of New Year's Eve assaults by men 'of north African or Arab appearance' because of fears of stirring social tensions

By Justin Huggler, Cologne

3:17PM GMT 06 Jan 2016


Public anger is growing in Germany over a series of sexual assaults against women in the centre of Cologne on New Year’s Eve, amid suggestions that authorities were slow to act due to political sensitivity surrounding the perpetrators' ethnicities.

VIDEO OF GERMAN PROTEST AT THE LINK

Politicians and police were facing mounting questions on Wednesday over how a crowd of some 1,000 men “of North African or Arab appearance” was able to mass around the city’s main train station on New Year’s Eve, with roving gangs allegedly assaulting dozens of women with impunity.


Crowds of people outside Cologne Main Station in Cologne on New Year's Eve Photo: EPA

Senior politicians have accused the press of self-censorship over fears the men's reported ethnicities could lead to scapegoating of migrants in general, amid tensions in Germany over its high levels of refugee arrivals.

• German protests over Cologne sexual assaults

More than 120 criminal complaints have been filed by women who were sexually assaulted or robbed, including at least two cases of rape. A police spokesman said at least three quarters of the complaints had a sexual component.



Michelle, one of the female victims of the sex attackers in Cologne, spoke on television of her shock at how the New Year's celebrations party turned into targeted attacks on women Photo: cen/ N-tv

The mass assaults have clear echoes of a phenomenon seen in Egypt during and after the Tahrir Square revolution of 2011 when posses of young men would gather apparently spontaneously around young women and harass them, often violently.
Authorities have said there is no concrete indication that the perpetrators were asylum seekers who arrived in last year's record influx, but opponents of Angela Merkel's welcoming policy towards migrants have leapt on the possible link. One far right councillor in Cologne wrote an open letter saying the city centre had now become a no-go area for women.

Police said some of the assaults in Cologne appeared similar to incidents that have been reported over the past two years in Duesseldorf, 25 miles away, where gangs identified as North African have groped women to distract them before stealing their belongings.

The Cologne police chief has rejected calls for his resignation as government ministers demand answers, as the fallout from the police handling of the attacks threatened to become a full-blown political crisis.

There has been widespread condemnation of the city's police force after an official press release on New Year’s Day described the celebrations as “peaceful”.


Many of the crowd at Cologne railway station appeared to be men 'of north African or Arab appearance' Photo: AP

Even Thomas de Maiziere, the German interior minister, spoke out in rare public criticism of the police. “I expect urgent clarification: was it organised, was it really North Africans, and how could they say it all went peacefully the next day,” he said.

“It can’t be that you clear the station area because fireworks were thrown, and later these events take place and you wait for complaints to be filed. The police should not work like that,” Mr de Maiziere added.

“We were there in force, we were not overwhelmed,” insisted Wolfang Albers, the Cologne police chief.

The city's mayor drew outrage after suggesting young women could avoid trouble from the gangs by staying over "an arm's length" away from strangers - an idea that was bitterly mocked by social media users who posted pictures of the Star Wars villain Darth Vader, cartoon cyborg-detective Inspector Gadget and a Hindu deity, all with their arms extended.

Police have identified three suspects, Ralf Jäger, the state interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia announced on Wednesday, but said they would not be publicly to avoid compromising police investigations.

Earlier, the German police union said it feared arrests were unlikely so long after the assaults.

Meanwhile questions are being asked over why it took five days for the media to report the incidents.

The ZDF public broadcaster issued a public apology after it failed to include the assaults in its main evening new broadcast on Tuesday.


The North Rhine-Westphalia Interior Minister Ralf Jäger answers questions during a news conference in Duesseldorf, Germany Photo: AP

Hans-Peter Freidrich, a former interior minister, accused the media of imposing a “news blackout” and operating a “code of silence” over negative news about immigrants.

“It’s a scandal that it took days for the media to pick up the reports,” Mr Friedrich, who was Angela Merkel’s interior minister from 2011 to 2013, said.

Media commentators warned that tip-toeing around the issue of sexual violence committed by migrants coming from conservative and sexually segregated societies risked storing up dangerous and festering resentments against the wider migrant population.

Norway and Denmark have already experimented with classes for new migrants to explain western sexual attitudes, the law and other issues like dress and the notion of a woman’s absolute right never to be forced into sex, even with marriage.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...itivities.html

Jan 7, 11:20 AM EST

GERMAN POLICE: WOMEN MADE TO 'RUN GAUNTLET' IN ATTACKS
BY FRANK JORDANS AND GEIR MOULSON
ASSOCIATED PRESS


AP Photo/Hermann J. Knippertz

COLOGNE, Germany (AP) -- An internal report by German police describes how women in the western city of Cologne had to run through mobs of drunken men who attacked them during New Year's celebrations, an experience likened to "running the gauntlet."

The report, details of which were widely published by German media Thursday, added to witness accounts describing a string of sexual assaults that have sparked a heated debate about migration and the police's failure to prevent the mayhem.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany must examine whether it has done enough to deport foreigners who commit crimes, after police said the perpetrators of the attack were of "Arab or North African origin."

While officials have cautioned against casting suspicion on migrants in general, the attacks have been seized on by some opponents of Germany's welcoming stance toward those fleeing conflict after the country registered nearly 1.1 million asylum-seekers last year.

"We must examine again and again whether we have already done what is necessary in terms of ... deportations from Germany in order to send clear signals to those who are not prepared to abide by our legal order," Merkel said.

She described the New Year's assaults as "repugnant criminal acts that ... Germany will not accept," and said changes to the law and increasing police presence may be examined.

"The feeling women had in this case of being at people's mercy, without any protection, is intolerable for me personally as well," she said. "And so it is important for everything that happened there to be put on the table."

German daily Bild on Thursday published extracts from an unidentified senior federal police officer's report on the attacks.

It recounts how federal units, who are also in charge of policing the railway system, were met by "anxious citizens with crying and shocked children" when they arrived at Cologne's main railway station on New Year's Eve.

The officer, said to have been in the job for 29 years, describes how "several thousand male persons with a migrant background" hurled fireworks and bottles into the crowds of revelers who had gathered in front of the city's cathedral to celebrate the new year.

The situation became tenser at 11:45 p.m. (2245 GMT) when more people arrived at the train station.

"Unaccompanied and accompanied women had to literally 'run the gauntlet' of very drunk men," the report said.

Officers managed to clear the square, but struggled to cope with the large number of violent men, it said.

"In the course of the operation numerous crying and shocked women/girls approached officers and told them of sexual assaults by male migrants/groups. Unfortunately it wasn't possible to identify them any more."

Federal police declined to comment on the internal report, which was also published by German news agency dpa and the news portal Spiegel Online.

The scale of the attacks has prompted calls for tougher rules on criminal foreigners. Germany's justice minister said asylum-seekers could be deported if they're found to have participated in the assaults.

Justice Minister Heiko Maas said in an interview with the Funke newspaper group that the law already allows for people to be deported during asylum proceedings if they're sentenced to a year or more in prison.

"The courts will have to decide on the level of sentences, but that penalty is in principle absolutely possible for sexual offenses," he said.

Police said Thursday they have now received 121 criminal complaints alleging sexual assault and robbery during the New Year's Eve festivities. That includes two accounts of rape.

They said investigators working with video footage have identified 16 young men - largely of North African origin - who may be suspects and are working to determine whether they committed any crimes. Authorities don't yet have names for most of the men.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said Wednesday that "anyone who commits serious crimes, whatever status he is in, must reckon with being deported from Germany."

"If it turns out that refugees were the perpetrators, then they forfeited their right to be guests," Andreas Scheuer, the general secretary of the conservative Christian Social Union - the smallest party in Merkel's coalition government - was quoted as telling Bild.

Responding to widespread criticism of the police's handling of the incident, Cologne's police chief Wolfgang Albers said he would report to the regional government on what happened but wouldn't publicly give further details before a meeting Monday of the state legislature's home affairs committee.

---http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_GERMANY_SEXUAL_ASSAULTS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TE MPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-01-07-11-20-43