This has been the top story in online German news for a couple of days now. The first two sections below are summarized from ZEIT ONLINE; the last is based on a chronology and another article from SPIEGEL ONLINE.
What Do We Know?
On New Year’s Eve several women were robbed and sexually harassed at Köln’s central railway station; the police have received 90 complaints so far. Some are for theft of bags, cell phones, and purses, and at least 15 are for sexual assaults. About a thousand people had gathered on the plaza in front of the station. According to the police, most were young men, many were intoxicated and were freely setting off fireworks, and the mood of the crowd became increasingly aggressive. Amidst this crowd women were surrounded, handled, and robbed.
What Don’t We Know?
We don’t know who the culprits were. Police say that witnesses have reported groups of anywhere from two or three men up to 20 or so and have described the men as ‘North African’. They say that some dozens of people were taken into custody at the railway station, but as yet they have no real information about them or about the men who harassed and robbed the women. ‘We now have a puzzle and are starting from scratch.’
The chief of the Köln police said today that even the number of people involved is unknown. Westdeutscher Rundfunk reports that the police are working on the assumption that there were several hundred; according to the Kölner Stadtanzeiger the police have about 40 suspects who were already known to the police and to one another. Over the weekend one investigator said, ‘The preliminary indications clearly point towards multiple offenders known to the police; they have nothing to do with refugees.’ Their nationalities are not known, nor whether they are resident in Köln.
The head of the Bund Deutscher Kriminalbeamter (more or less a national police union) said that this was nothing new: criminal gangs, which number amongst their membership many from the Balkans and North Africa, have been using such techniques for a long time. Similar events have occurred at the Oktoberfest in München, for example. However, it has been pointed out that the scale of the incident is something new: at this year’s Oktoberfest, for instance, 20 sexual offenses were reported over the entire two-week span.
Where Were the Police?
There have been complaints that the police weren’t doing their job, notably from Thomas de Maizière, the Interior Minister, but it’s not clear that they are justified. The crowd was so large and chaotic that the crimes were hard to spot, and apparently neither the police nor railway officials noticed them. Around 23:30 the police, fearing an escalation of the fireworks, began to clear the plaza and the cathedral stairs. With such a large and unruly crowd it took them a while, but by 0:45 they were able to reopen access to the railway station. The got the first reports of theft and sexual harassment around 1:00 and started pointing out the danger to women and accompanying them to the station entrance. They also expelled some especially aggressive individuals after recording their personal data. At this point, however, they apparently had not witnessed any of the actual crimes and had taken no one into custody. The extent of the problem only began to appear on Friday, 1 January, first in social media and, in the evening, in local media, and by Saturday afternoon the police were aware of not quite 30 incidents.
For the future they plan a stronger police presence at large events, with more mobile video cameras that can observe crowds from above. They also intend to prohibit persons who have previous attracted attention for picking pockets, for instance, from entering certain areas.
And More of the Same in Hamburg
According to Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Hamburg police are also investigating New Year’s Eve attacks on women. Each of the women was surrounded by several men on the Reeperbahn and groped on the breast or genital area while their cell phones, papers, and money were taken. By Tuesday evening 27 complaints had been counted.