For any woman, the sight must have been terrifying. On New Year’s Eve in the German city of Cologne, groups of drunk and aggressive men surrounded them in the town centre, groping and mugging them. The estimates are that there were between 500 to 1,000 attackers, and the early indications are that their efforts were co-ordinated.
A minister described these events as a “completely new dimension of crime”. According to Wolfgang Albers, the police president, “sexual crimes took place on a huge scale”. He continued: “The crimes were committed by a group of people who from appearance were largely from the north African or Arab world.”
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