Having read about this and thinking on it some more, I have a number of questions.
Anti-muslim sentiment is high in Germany, especially amongst older and more conservative ethnic Germans. Are these events being sensationalized?
Why would the news media cover up the story? On whose orders? How could the story be contained on social media? Could be it took a few days for a pattern to emerge that could be reported on.
Understand that in Germany the whole country goes out on the streets at midnight to light fireworks and drink champagne. In a large city like Koln, is it unusual to have 90 arrests on New Years Eve? Of those 90 arrests, there was one rape and a few gropings reported, and the rest of the arrests were petty crimes. Of course one rape or groping is one too many, but what evidence is there that there was a coordinated plan to sexually assault women? What evidence is there that there was a coordinated assault by 1,000 muslim men?
German police say New Year's assaults may be linked to criminal network
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/cologne...ar-s-1.3391349
A more nuanced picture of what happened in the New Year's Eve chaos outside the Cologne train station emerged Wednesday.
Police said about 1,000 men gathered there and that smaller groups surrounded individual women, harassed them and stole their belongings. Police do not believe all 1,000 men were involved in the attacks.
About 90 people filed criminal complaints, though police have not said how many of them were women who were sexually assaulted. At least one woman said she was raped.
Police said some of the assaults in Cologne appeared similar to incidents that have been reported over the past two years in Duesseldorf, where men have groped women to distract them before stealing their belongings. The two cities are 40 kilometres apart.
Markus Niesczeri, a spokesman for Duesseldorf police, said that since the start of 2014, officers there have identified more than 2,000 suspects of North African origin in connection with organized thefts, though he did not say how many.
Authorities have cautioned that the nationality and residency status of the Cologne suspects is still unknown, since no one has been arrested.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...a-1070583.html
Cologne's police chief, Wolfgang Albers, said that a quarter of the complaints made were related to sexual harassment or groping, with many others pertaining to theft of purses, wallets and mobile phones. He said that smaller groups of men repeatedly emerged from a crowd of about 1,000 young men to surround women, harass them and steal from them. According to the Cologne daily Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, many of the presumed perpetrators are suspected of being from a large group of men that has attracted the attention of police in the past several months. Prior to New Year's Eve, the group had been involved in theft and petty crimes in Cologne nightlife districts.
Groups critical of Islam and foreigners have been quick to seek to appropriate the events in Cologne for their own purposes. Pegida, for example, the Islamophobic movement that got its start in Dresden, has posted several comments about the Cologne attacks on its numerous Facebook sites, with supporters responding in a predictably offensive manner.
Many German politicians commenting on Tuesday about the events in Cologne have been careful to calibrate their responses so as to avoid playing into the hands of right-wing Islamophobes. "We will not tolerate organized groups of men from North Africa that debase defenseless women with brazen sexual attacks," said Ralf Jäger, interior minister of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. He added, however, that the authorities will do everything in their power to ensure that such attacks are not repeated. "We owe that to women as well as to those North African refugees who want to live peacefully among us."
Ulf Küch, police chief in the city of Braunschweig, which has also suffered at the hands of small-time criminals from migrant backgrounds, told SPIEGEL ONLINE in November that the vast majority of migrants from the region are law-abiding. "We have found that very few immigrants commit crimes, but those who do commit a number of crimes," says Küch. Official statistics would seem to indicate that his impression is right. A study released in November by the German Federal Criminal Police Office on crime committed by refugees shows that the number of offenses perpetrated by migrants is rising much more slowly than the number of migrants coming to Germany.