The police chief of the German city of Cologne was suspended yesterday for failing to stop mob violence at New Year’s Eve celebrations, as authorities said many suspects were asylum seekers.
Germany, unsettled by a record refugee influx, has reacted with shock to news that women had to run a gauntlet of groping, lewd insults and thefts in an aggressive and drunken crush of around 1,000 men, described by witnesses as mostly of Arab and North African appearance.
Cologne’s police chief Wolfgang Albers, 60, was suspended from active duty in order to “restore public confidence” in the police force, said Ralf Jaeger, interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia state.
Albers, head of the force since 2011, showed “great understanding” in the matter, the state minister said at a press conference.
The 60-year-old did not resist Jaeger’s calls for his resignation, later saying that he “accepted” the decision in light of the major criticism that has centred around the police’s management of the attacks.
“But the police officers who were on duty at Cologne Main Station on the night of New Year’s Eve do not deserve this criticism,” Albers said.
Albers had come under intense pressure – both for failing to stop the attacks, and for downplaying the true extent of the chaos, which only hit national headlines four days later.
Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere had fumed that “police cannot work this way”.
Having initially reported a “peaceful” night, Cologne police were slow to unveil the true extent of the carnage, and the politically charged fact that the hostile crowd was made up mostly of migrants.
By morning yesterday, as more women had come forward, Cologne police had received over 200 criminal complaints, mostly over sexual offences from groping to two alleged rapes, Spiegel Online reported.
A week after the spate of assaults outside Cologne railway station and the city’s iconic Gothic cathedral, federal police said they had identified 31 suspects over offences from theft to physical attacks, though not sexual assaults.
Eighteen of them were asylum seekers, the interior ministry said.
Among the suspects were nine Algerians, eight Moroccans, five Iranians, four Syrians, one Iraqi and one Serb, as well as two Germans and one US national, ministry spokesman Tobias Plate said.
Outrage resonated beyond Germany, with Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, a hardliner on the migrant issue, calling for an extraordinary EU summit on the historic refugee wave.
Politicians were continuing “to trivialise – even after the attacks in Cologne and other European cities – the security risks associated with unregulated and uncontrolled migration within the EU”, he said.
In Germany, the spate of assaults has inflamed a heated public debate about how to integrate the nearly 1.1mn asylum seekers the country took in last year.
Right-wing populists have charged that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal migration policy has fuelled crime and destabilised society.
The anti-migrant and Islamophobic PEGIDA movement has announced a rally in Cologne today, while counter demonstrators have also vowed to take to the streets.
Yesterday Swiss artist Milo Moire threw off her clothes in front of Cologne’s cathedral in protest against the sexual assaults, carrying a sign that read “Respect us! We are not fair game even when we are naked!!!”
Merkel’s spokesman George Streiter said it was “important that the whole truth comes out, that nothing is withheld or glossed over”, but also warned that migrants must not be put under general suspicion or collectively blamed.
“Primarily, this is not about refugees but about criminality,” he said, noting that most asylum seekers in Germany had come seeking protection.
Still, the mob attacks have fuelled popular doubts about the biggest influx of asylum seekers to any EU nation and led German leaders to promise to better enforce law and order.
“We must do everything to prevent such incidents from happening again,” de Maiziere told the Rheinische Post daily, pledging “more CCTV cameras in places where many people gather, a heightened (police) presence on the streets and harsher penalties”.
At the weekend, Merkel’s conservative party plans to discuss tougher policies, and the speeding up of deportations.
“We need more police, a better equipped judiciary and tougher laws, among other things to more quickly expel criminal foreigners,” said Volker Kauder, the parliamentary leader of Merkel’s Christian Democrats.
Under current laws, asylum seekers are only forcibly sent back if they have been sentenced to jail terms of at least three years, and if their lives are not at risk in their countries of origin.
And there is a backlog in carrying out officially-ordered deportations.
Merkel herself has vowed to “re-examine whether everything necessary has been done with regards to expulsions to send a clear signal to those who do not respect our laws”.
The wave of New Year’s Eve crimes in Cologne were mirrored in Hamburg, where 108 complaints were filed, and to a much lesser extent in other cities.