Shooting in Munich Shopping Center - Page 31

All of the incidents involved women being surrounded and assaulted by groups of men on the street.[23][24] There are more than 1,900 victims – 1,200 of whom were sexually assaulted – and police stated that at least 2,000 men were involved, acting in groups.[25] Police reported that the perpetrators were men of "Arab or North African appearance" and said that Germany had never experienced such mass sexual assaults before.[24][26][27][28][29] The attacks sparked an international outcry, a debate about women's rights, the sustainability of Germany's asylum policy, and social differences between European societies and those of North Africa and the Middle East. Taking place during the European migrant crisis (see timeline), the attacks also led to a hardening of attitudes against mass immigration.[30]

In Düsseldorf, nine persons were named as suspects, eight of whom are migrants.[85] According to a media report, an 18-year-old woman from Mönchengladbach recognized a perpetrator in a report of Spiegel TV and decided to make a complaint to the police afterwards. The 33-year-old man, who is suspected to have sexually offended the woman in Düsseldorf out of a group, was arrested by investigators.[33] In Dortmund, nine further people were put under suspicion, seven of them migrants.[85] In Bielefeld, four migrants from Morocco and Algeria were identified as suspects.[85] By 20 January, the North Rhine-Westphalia Police, responsible for Bielefeld, Cologne, Dortmund, and Düsseldorf, reported that 52 people were being treated as suspects; a majority of them were of non-German origin.[18]

Eight people were named as suspects in Hamburg, all of them migrants and some of them refugees.[16] On 20 January, Hamburg police published photos of two wanted persons who are suspected to have sexually assaulted an 18-year-old girl in the early morning hours of 1 January on the street of Große Freiheit,[77] which led to the arrest of a 29-year-old male migrant from Afghanistan on 21 January. He was recognised by a security guard of a refugee reception center in Hamburg. A second suspected migrant was freed shortly after his arrest due to a lack of adequate suspicion.[78] On 26 January, Hamburg police published another photo of a wanted person, who is suspected to have sexually assaulted two 20-year-old women on New Year's Eve while acting as part of a group.[119] On 5 February, a 33-year-old man from Iran was reported to have been arrested in a refugee reception center in Hamburg and taken into investigative custody under suspicion of assaulting the two women in Hamburg.[120][121] On 4 February, Hamburg police released photos of two further suspects. The nationwide TV series Aktenzeichen XY … ungelöst was used for the manhunt for the Hamburg perpetrators.[3]

In Stuttgart, a 20-year-old asylum seeker from Iraq was detained for sexually assaulting two girls while acting out of a group.[84] In Frankfurt, the police is investigating ten men in the ages of 15 to 27, all asylum seekers or refugees, who were temporarily arrested for pickpocketing on New Year's Eve near the bridge of Eiserner Steg. They are trying to determine if these men were involved in the sexual assaults. One of the suspects is in investigative custody.[83]

Reinhard Merkel, a law professor from Hamburg, said that convicting the suspects, especially for sexual offences, will be difficult because an unequivocal identification by the victims is needed, which is often not the case. Furthermore, policemen stated that the video footage of the cameras within and outside the Cologne main station is partly unusable.[122]