Cologne New Year’s Eve ‘rape mob’ attacks were planned: Minister

JUST when Germans didn’t think the NYE mass sex attack scandal couldn’t get any worse, chilling new details have emerged.

Participants of a women's flash mob demonstrate against racism and sexism in Cologne, Germany, Saturday, Jan. 9, 2016. Women’s rights activists, far-right demonstrators and left-wing counter-protesters all took to the streets of Cologne on Saturday in the aftermath of a string of New Year’s Eve sexual assaults and robberies in Cologne blamed largely on foreigners. (AP Photo/Juergen Schwarz)

THE German city of Cologne is reeling at revelations a series of hundreds of violent sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve on local women were co-ordinated.

Police in the city now say they have recorded more than 500 cases of New Year’s Eve violence.

The assaulted have shocked Germany and put a spotlight on the 1.1 million asylum seekers who arrived in the country last year.

Blame for the violent attacks has largely fallen on migrants, piling fresh pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel over her liberal stance on immigration.

Startling witnesses accounts described terrifying scenes of hundreds of women running a gauntlet of groping hands, lewd insults and robberies in the mob violence.

New Year’s Eve celebrations took a startling turn when a mob descended on the crowd at Cologne, resulting in hundreds of complaints of violent and sexual attacks. Picture: Markus Boehm/AFP

The scale of the assault has Justice Minister Heiko Maas convinced the violence in the western city was organised.

“For such a horde of people to meet and commit such crimes, it has to have been planned somehow,” he told Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

“No one can tell me that this was not co-ordinated or planned. The suspicion is that a specific date and an expected crowd was picked.”

Quoting confidential police reports, Bild am Sonntag said some North Africans had sent out calls using social networks for people to gather in Cologne on New Year’s Eve.

Police have now collected some 516 related complaints from the night, 40 per cent of which related to sexual assault. Thirty-one men have been arrested, 18 of whom are refugees, police said.

People in Cologne have been angered by the apparently co-ordinated attacks. Picture: Sascha Schuermann/Getty Images

Women's group have also held demonstrate against racism and sexism in Cologne. Picture: Juergen Schwarz/AP Photo

Even though no formal charges have been laid, Cologne police have said those suspected over the New Year’s rampage near the city’s railway station were mostly asylum seekers and illegal migrants from North Africa.

Separately in Hamburg, police said they had received 133 criminal complaints for similar violence during the northern city’s own New Year’s Eve celebrations.

With thousands of asylum seekers streaming into Germany every day since last year, Merkel has already come under fire from critics, even within her own conservative alliance, who want her to reverse her open-door policy to war refugees.

Critics have questioned Germany’s ability to integrate the massive numbers of newcomers, many of whom hail from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

German chancellor Angela Merkel has been forced to take a tough stance and call for deportation laws to be reviewed. Picture: Fredrik von Erichsen/AP

Merkel had until now not wavered from her stance, even using her New Year’s address to tell Germans that the record influx was “an opportunity for tomorrow”.

But after Cologne, she has adopted a harsher tone, saying also that “we must speak again about the cultural fundamentals of our co-existence”.

She took a tough line on Saturday, saying she backed changes to the law to make it easier to expel asylum seekers convicted of a crime.

“If the law does not suffice, then the law must be changed,” she said.