German protesters seething over a series of sexual assaults of women by migrants on New Year’s Eve brought tensions to a flashpoint in Cologne, where police unleashed water cannons and tear gas to control crowds.
Fallout from the holiday attacks — in which dozens of women in the western German city endured a horrifying “gauntlet” of groping and violence by mobs of men — has heightened anger over the country’s welcoming attitude toward migrants and refugees.
Dueling groups took over the streets Saturday, including 1,700 anti-Muslim demonstrators who threw bottles and firecrackers at cops and carried signs reading, “Rapefugees Not Welcome,” and shouting, “Merkel out,” denouncing the open-door policy of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who welcomed 1.1 million refugees and migrants to Germany in 2015.
The right-wing group, many representing the anti-Islam PEGIDA movement, was met by roughly 1,300 equally angry left-wing protesters, with both groups expressing horror at the extent of the New Year’s Eve attacks.
At least 150 reports of sexual assault have been filed, out of 379 complaints of robbery and violence, said police, who admitted after days of denials that most of the attackers were asylum seekers and illegal migrants.
In Cologne, a police report kept under wraps for days described women having to “run a gantlet” of drunken, abusive “Arab and North African” men in the square bounded by the Cologne Cathedral, one of Germany’s best-known Christian symbols, and its modernist glass Central Station.
The New Year’s crowd, at least 1,000 strong, massively outnumbered the police on patrol in the square, leaving cops helpless to counter at least two rapes and other brutal attacks from those who allegedly burned women with firecrackers, reached under their skirts to grope them, grabbed their breasts, tore off their undergarments, and screamed obscenities.
Saturday’s heavy police presence in the square was in stark contrast to the meager forces in place on New Year’s Eve, protesters on both sides said.
“The police come after us but they don’t dare touch the Syrians,” one anti-Merkel activist complained to the Sunday Times of London.