During the β celebrations of New Year's Eve in Germany , approximately 1, women were reported to have been sexually assaulted , especially in the city of Cologne. In many of the incidents, while these women were in public spaces, they were surrounded and assaulted by large groups of men who were identified by officials as Muslim men of Arab or North African origin. By 4 January , German media reports stated that, in Cologne, the perpetrators had mostly been described by the victims and witnesses as being " North African ", " Arab ", "dark-skinned", and "foreign".
On 5 January , the German government and the Cologne police speculated that the attacks might have been organized. Instead, the Cologne police chief suggested that the perpetrators had come from countries where such sexual assaults by groups of men against women are common. There are conflicting accounts about when reports of sexual assaults during New Year's Night β16 first reached the Cologne police. One high-ranking Cologne police officer reported that in the evening around on 31 December , passers-by in the plaza between the Cologne Central Train Station and the Cologne Cathedral informed police officers on the spot about fights, robberies, and sexual assaults on women taking place in and around the train station; [ 25 ] The New York Times wrote however that only after midnight did the police hear of the assaults, [ 26 ] and the German newspaper Die Welt suggested the same.
In a press release on 1 January at [ 29 ] or , [ 30 ] the Cologne police announced that the night had been "mostly peaceful" "weitgehend friedlich" [ 29 ] [ 30 ] β also rendered as: "relaxed" [ 16 ] "entspannt". On Saturday, 2 January, at , the Cologne police reported the harassment incidents in a new press release: nearly 30 criminal notifications of attacks and robberies on women, in some cases indecent touching of women by groups of men with a "north African appearance", according to witnesses.
At a press conference on Monday, 4 January at , [ 30 ] Cologne's police chief Wolfgang Albers stated that "a very large number of sexual assaults " had been committed on Cologne's New Year's Night by groups of young men "with an appearance largely from the north African or Arab world", [ 11 ] with all witnesses having uttered this same racial description.
On 5 January , 90 reports of criminal incidents had been received by the Cologne police concerning New Year's Eve, [ 28 ] 22 or 23 of which were sexual assaults. By 8 January, women had reported various crimes during New Year's Eve in Cologne, including two rapes.
