At least 18 asylum seekers are among 31 people who have been identified so far by the federal police as having played a role in a violent assault on young women in the German city of Cologne on New Year’s Eve, the Interior Ministry said on Friday.
The police chief in Cologne was forced out of his job on Friday amid the growing uproar over the episode, which has ignited calls across the political spectrum for expelling convicted criminals, even if they are seeking asylum from war and persecution at home.
The 31 people linked to the violence in a police report include nine Algerians, eight Moroccans, five Iranians and four Syrians, said an Interior Ministry spokesman, Tobias Plate. Two Germans, an Iraqi, a Serb and a United States citizen were also among those linked to crimes that night, Plate said.
He said that a vast majority of the 32 criminal acts documented by the federal police on the night had been linked to theft and bodily injury. Three were related to sexual assaults, but the police had no names of suspects tied to those acts, Plate said.
The authorities emphasized that the 31 suspects were still under investigation, and that they had not been placed under arrest. On Friday, the authorities in Cologne announced two arrests — of a 16-year-old from Morocco and a 23-year-old from Tunisia — reportedly after the police found video clips of the violence on their cellphones. But the two were released because there was insufficient evidence that they were involved in the violence, said the Cologne public prosecutor, Benedikt Kortz.
About 170 people have now filed criminal complaints, about 120 of them relating to sexual assault, linked to the New Year’s Eve episode in Cologne, according to a police spokesman in the city. A federal police report leaked to the German news media and confirmed as genuine by the Interior Ministry indicated that at least some young men, including asylum applicants, had planned in advance to meet around the Cologne railway station, where much of the violence is said to have occurred, on Dec. 31.
